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Title: Mary Marston

Author: George MacDonald

Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8201]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 1, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY MARSTON ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks,
Juliet Sutherland and the DP Team




MARY MARSTON

A NOVEL.

BY

GEORGE MACDONALD

AUTHOR OF "ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD," "ROBERT FALCONER,"
ETC., ETC.




CONTENTS.

   I.-THE SHOP
   II.-CUSTOMERS
   III.-THE ARBOR AT THORNWICK
   IV.-GODFREY WARDOUR
   V.-GODFREY AND LETTY
   VI.-TOM HELMER
   VII.-DURNMELLING
   VIII.-THE OAK
   IX.-CONFUSION
   X.-THE HEATH AND THE HUT
   XI.-WILLIAM MARSTON
   XII.-MARY'S DREAM
   XIII.-THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
   XIV.-UNGENEROUS BENEVOLENCE
   XV.-THE MOONLIGHT
   XVI.-THE MORNING
   XVII.-THE RESULT
   XVIII.-MARY AND GODFREY
   XIX.-MARY IN THE SHOP
   XX.-THE WEDDING-DRESS
   XXI.-MR. REDMAIN
   XXII.-MRS. REDMAIN
   XXIII.-THE MENIAL
   XXIV.-MRS. REDMAIN'S DRAWING-ROOM
   XXV.-MARY'S RECEPTION
   XXVI.-HER POSITION
   XXVII.-MR. AND MRS. HELMER
   XXVIII.-MARY AND LETTY
   XXIX.-THE EVENING STAR
   XXX.-A SCOLDING
   XXXI.-SEPIA
   XXXII.-HONOR
   XXXIII.-TUB INVITATION
   XXXIV.-A STRAY SOUND
   XXXV.-THE MUSICIAN
   XXXVI.-A CHANGE
   XXXVII.-LYDGATE STREET
   XXXVIII.-GODFREY AND LETTY
   XXXIX.-RELIEF
   XL.-GODFREY AND SEPIA
   XLI-THE HELPER
   XLII-THE LEPER
   XLIII.-MARY AND MR. REDMAIN
   XLIV.-JOSEPH JASPER
   XLV.-THE SAPPHIRE
   XLVL-REPARATION
   XLVII.-ANOTHER CHANGE
   XLVIIL-DISSOLUTION
   XLIX.-THORNWICK
   L.-WILLIAM AND MARY MARSTON
   LI.-A HARD TASK
   LII.-A SUMMONS
   LIII.-A FRIEND IN NEED
   LIV.-THE NEXT NIGHT
   LV.-DISAPPEARANCE
   LVI.-A CATASTROPHE
   LVII.-THE END OF THE BEGINNING




CHAPTER I

THE SHOP


It was an evening early in May. The sun was low, and the street
was mottled with the shadows of its paving-stones--smooth enough,
but far from evenly set. The sky was clear, except for a few
clouds in the west, hardly visible in the dazzle of the huge
light, which lay among them like a liquid that had broken its
vessel, and was pouring over the fragments. The street was almost
empty, and the air was chill. The spring was busy, and the summer
was at hand; but the wind was blowing from the north.

The street was not a common one; there was interest, that is
feature, in the shadowy front of almost each of its old houses.
Not a few of them wore, indeed, something like a human
expression, the look of having both known and suffered. From many
a porch, and many a latticed oriel, a long shadow stretched
eastward, like a death flag streaming in a wind unfelt of the
body--or a fluttering leaf, ready to yield, and flit away, and
add one more to the mound of blackness gathering on the horizon's
edge. It was the main street of an old country town, dwindled by
the rise of larger and more prosperous places, but holding and
exercising a charm none of them would ever gain.

Some of the oldest of its houses, most of them with more than one
projecting story, stood about the middle of the street. The
central and oldest of these was a draper's shop. The windows of
the ground-floor encroached a little on the pavement, to which
they descended very close, for the floor of the shop was lower
than the street. But, although they had glass on three oriel
sides, they were little used for the advertising of the stores
within. A few ribbons and gay handkerchiefs, mostly of cotton,
for the eyes of the country people on market-days, formed the
chief part of their humble show. The door was wide and very low,
the upper half of it of glass--old, and bottle-colored; and its
threshold was a deep step down into the shop. As a place for
purchases it might not to some eyes look promising, but both the
ladies and the housekeepers of Testbridge knew that rarely could
they do better in London itself than at the shop of Turnbull and
Marston, whether variety, quality, or price, was the point in
consideration. And, whatever the first impression concerning it,
the moment the eyes of a stranger began to grow accustomed to its
gloom, the evident size and plenitude of the shop might well
suggest a large hope. It was low, indeed, and the walls could
therefore accommodate few shelves; but the ceiling was therefore
so near as to be itself available for stowage by means of well-
contrived slides and shelves attached to the great beams crossing
it in several directions. During the shop-day, many an article,
light as lace, and heavy as broadcloth, was taken from overhead
to lay upon the counter. The shop had a special reputation for
all kinds of linen goods, from cambric handkerchiefs to towels,
and from table-napkins to sheets; but almost everything was to be
found in it, from Manchester moleskins for the navy's trousers,
to Genoa velvet for the dowager's gown, and from Horrocks's
prints to Lyons silks. It had been enlarged at the back, by
building beyond the original plan, and that part of it was a
little higher, and a little better lighted than the front; but
the whole place was still dark enough to have awaked the envy of
any swindling London shopkeeper. Its owners, however, had so long
enjoyed the confidence of the neighborhood, that faith readily
took the place of sight with their customers--so far at least as
quality was concerned; and seldom, except in a question of color
or shade, was an article carried to the door to be confronted
with the day. It had been just such a shop, untouched of even
legendary change, as far back as the memory of the sexton
reached; and he, because of his age and his occupation, was the
chief authority in the local history of the place.

As, on this evening, there were few people in the street, so were
there few in the shop, and it was on the point of being closed:
they were not particular there to a good many minutes either way.
Behind the counter, on the left hand, stood a youth of about
twenty, young George Turnbull, the son of the principal partner,
occupied in leisurely folding and putting aside a number of
things he had been showing to a farmer's wife, who was just gone.
He was an ordinary-looking lad, with little more than business in
his high forehead, fresh-colored, good-humored, self-satisfied
cheeks, and keen hazel eyes. These last kept wandering from his
not very pressing occupation to the other side of the shop, where
stood, behind the opposing counter, a young woman, in attendance
upon the wants of a well-dressed youth in front of it, who had
just made choice of a pair of driving-gloves. His air and
carriage were conventionally those of a gentleman--a gentleman,
however, more than ordinarily desirous of pleasing a young woman
behind a counter. She answered him with politeness, and even
friendliness, nor seemed aware of anything unusual in his
attentions.

"They're splendid gloves," he said, making talk; "but don't you
think it a great price for a pair of gloves, Miss Marston?"

"It is a good deal of money," she answered, in a sweet, quiet
voice, whose very tone suggested simplicity and
straightforwardness; "but they will last you a long time. Just
look at the work, Mr. Helmer. You see how they are made? It is
much more difficult to stitch them like that, one edge over the
other, than to sew the two edges together, as they do with
ladies' gloves. But I'll just ask my father whether he marked
them himself."

"He did mark those, I know," said young Turnbull, who had been
listening to all that went on, "for I heard my father say they
ought to be sixpence more."

"Ah, then!" she returned, assentingly, and laid the gloves on the
box before her, the question settled.

Helmer took them, and began to put them on.

"They certainly are the only glove where there is much handling
of reins," he said.

"That is what Mr. Wardour says of them," rejoined Miss Marston.

"By the by," said Helmer, lowering his voice, "when did you see
anybody from Thornwick?"

"Their old man was in the town yesterday with the dog-cart."

"Nobody with him?"

"Miss Letty. She came in for just two minutes or so."

"How was she looking?"

"Very well," answered Miss Marston, with what to Helmer seemed
indifference.

"Ah!" he said, with a look of knowingness, "you girls don't see
each other with the same eyes as we. I grant Letty is not very
tall, and I grant she has not much of a complexion; but where did
you ever see such eyes?"

"You must excuse me, Mr. Helmer," returned Mary, with a smile,
"if I don't choose to discuss Letty's merits with you; she is my
friend."

"Where would be the harm?" rejoined Helmer, looking puzzled. "I
am not likely to say anything against her. You know perfectly
well I admire her beyond any woman in the world. I don't care who
knows it."

"Your mother?" suggested Mary, in the tone of one who makes a
venture.

"Ah, come now, Miss Marston! Don't you turn my mother loose upon
me. I shall be of age in a few months, and then my mother may--
think as she pleases. I know, of course, with her notions, she
would never consent to my making love to Letty--"

"I should think not!" exclaimed Mary. "Who ever thought of such
an absurdity? Not you, surely, Mr. Helmer? What would your mother
say to hear you? I mention her in earnest now."

"Let mothers mind their own business!" retorted the youth
angrily. "I shall mind mine. My mother ought to know that by this
time."

Mary said no more. She knew Mrs. Helmer was not a mother to
deserve her boy's confidence, any more than to gain it; for she
treated him as if she had made him, and was not satisfied with
her work.

"When are you going to see Letty, Miss Marston?" resumed Helmer,
after a brief pause of angry feeling.

"Next Sunday evening probably."

"Take me with you."

"Take you with me! What are you dreaming of, Mr. Helmer?"

"I would give my bay mare for a good talk with Letty Lovel," he
returned.

Mary made no reply.

"You won't?" he said petulantly, after a vain pause of
expectation.

"Won't what?" rejoined Miss Marston, as if she could not believe
him in earnest.

"Take me with you on Sunday?"

"No," she answered quietly, but with sober decision.

"Where would be the harm?" pleaded the youth, in a tone mingled
of expostulation, entreaty, and mortification.

"One is not bound to do everything there would be no harm in
doing," answered Miss Marston. "Besides, Mr. Helmer, I don't
choose to go out walking with you of a Sunday evening."

"Why not?"

"For one thing, your mother would not like it. You know she would
not."

"Never mind my mother. She's nothing to you. She can't bite you.
--Ask the dentist. Come, come! that's all nonsense. I shall be at
the stile beyond the turnpike-gate all the afternoon--waiting
till you come."

"The moment I see you--anywhere upon the road--that moment I
shall turn back.--Do you think," she added with half-amused
indignation, "I would put up with having all the gossips of
Testbridge talk of my going out on a Sunday evening with a boy
like you?"

Tom Helmer's face flushed. He caught up the gloves, threw the
price of them on the counter, and walked from the shop, without
even a good night.

"Hullo!" cried George Turnbull, vaulting over the counter, and
taking the place Helmer had just left opposite Mary; "what did
you say to the fellow to send him off like that? If you do hate
the business, you needn't scare the customers, Mary."

"I don't hate the business, you know quite well, George. And if I
did scare a customer," she added, laughing, as she dropped the
money in the till, "it was not before he had done buying."

"That may be; but we must look to to-morrow as well as to-day.
When is Mr. Helmer likely to come near us again, after such a
wipe as you must have given him to make him go off like that?"

"Just to-morrow, George, I fancy," answered Mary. "He won't be
able to bear the thought of having left a bad impression on me,
and so he'll come again to remove it. After all, there's
something about him I can't help liking. I said nothing that
ought to have put him out of temper like that, though; I only
called him a boy."

"Let me tell you, Mary, you could not have called him a worse
name."

"Why, what else is he?"

"A more offensive word a man could not hear from the lips of a
woman," said George loftily.

"A man, I dare say! But Mr. Helmer can't be nineteen yet."

"How can you say so, when he told you himself he would be of age
in a few months? The fellow is older than I am. You'll be calling
me a boy next."

"What else are you? You at least are not one-and-twenty."

"And how old do you call yourself, pray, miss?"

"Three-and-twenty last birthday."

"A mighty difference indeed!"

"Not much--only all the difference, it seems, between sense and
absurdity, George."

"That may be all very true of a fine gentleman, like Helmer, that
does nothing from morning to night but run away from his mother;
but you don't think it applies to me, Mary, I hope!"

"That's as you behave yourself, George. If you do not make it
apply, it won't apply of itself. But if young women had not more
sense than most of the young men I see in the shop--on both sides
of the counter, George--things would soon be at a fine pass.
Nothing better in your head than in a peacock's!--only that a
peacock _has_ the fine feathers he's so proud of."

"If it were Mr. Wardour now, Mary, that was spreading his tail
for you to see, you would not complain of that peacock!"

A vivid rose blossomed instantly in Mary's cheek. Mr. Wardour was
not even an acquaintance of hers. He was cousin and friend to
Letty Lovel, indeed, but she had never spoken to him, except in
the shop.

"It would not be quite out of place if you were to learn a little
respect for your superiors, George," she returned. "Mr. Wardour
is not to be thought of in the same moment with the young men
that were in my mind. Mr. Wardour is not a young man; and he is a
gentleman."

She took the glove-box, and turning placed it on a shelf behind
her.

"Just so!" remarked George, bitterly. "Any man you don't choose
to count a gentleman, you look down upon! What have you got to do
with gentlemen, I should like to know?"

"To admire one when I see him," answered Mary. "Why shouldn't I?
It is very seldom, and it does me good."

"Oh, yes!" rejoined George, contemptuously. "You _call_
yourself a lady, but--"

"I do nothing of the kind," interrupted Mary, sharply. "I should
_like_ to be a lady; and inside of me, please God, I
_will_ be a lady; but I leave it to other people to call me
this or that. It matters little what any one is _called_."

"All right," returned George, a little cowed; "I don't mean to
contradict you. Only just tell me why a well-to-do tradesman
shouldn't be a gentleman as well as a small yeoman like Wardour."

"Why don't you say--as well as a squire, or an earl, or a duke?"
said Mary.

"There you are, chaffing me again! It's hard enough to have every
fool of a lawyer's clerk, or a doctor's boy, looking down upon a
fellow, and calling him a counter-jumper; but, upon my soul, it's
too bad when a girl in the same shop hasn't a civil word for him,
because he isn't what she counts a gentleman! Isn't my father a
gentleman? Answer me that, Mary."

It was one of George's few good things that he had a great
opinion of his father, though the grounds of it were hardly such
as to enable Mary to answer his appeal in a way he would have
counted satisfactory. She thought of her own father, and was
silent.

"Everything depends on what a man is in himself, George," she
answered. "Mr. Wardour would be a gentleman all the same if he
were a shopkeeper or a blacksmith."

"And shouldn't I be as good a gentleman as Mr. Wardour, if I had
been born with an old tumble-down house on my back, and a few
acres of land I could do with as I liked? Come, answer me that."

"If it be the house and the land that makes the difference, you
would, of course," answered Mary.

Her tone implied, even to George's rough perceptions, that there
was a good deal more of a difference between them than therein
lay. But common people, whether lords or shopkeepers, are slow to
understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth, or
lands, or money, or intellect, is a small affair in the
difference between men.

"I know you don't think me fit to hold a candle to him," he said.
"But I happen to know, for all he rides such a good horse, he's
not above doing the work of a wretched menial, for he polishes
his own stirrup-irons."

"I'm very glad to hear it," rejoined Mary. "He must be more of a
gentleman yet than I thought him."

"Then why should you count him a better gentleman than me?"

"I'm afraid for one thing, you would go with your stirrup-irons
rusty, rather than clean them yourself, George. But I will tell
you one thing Mr. Wardour would not do if he were a shopkeeper:
he would not, like you, talk one way to the rich, and another way
to the poor--all submission and politeness to the one, and
familiarity, even to rudeness, with the other! If you go on like
that, you'll never come within sight of being a gentleman,
George--not if you live to the age of Methuselah."

"Thank you, Miss Mary! It's a fine thing to have a lady in the
shop! Shouldn't I just like my father to hear you! I'm blowed if
I know how a fellow is to get on with you! Certain sure I am that
it ain't _my_ fault if we're not friends."

Mary made no reply. She could not help understanding what George
meant, and she flushed, with honest anger, from brow to chin.
But, while her dark-blue eyes flamed with indignation, her anger
was not such as to render her face less pleasant to look upon.
There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with
which they ought to end: Mary's anger had no hate in it.

I must now hope my readers sufficiently interested in my
narrative to care that I should tell them something of what she
was like. Plainly as I see her, I can not do more for them than
that. I can not give a portrait of her; I can but cast her shadow
on my page. It was a dainty half-length, neither tall nor short,
in a plain, well-fitting dress of black silk, with linen collar
and cuffs, that rose above the counter, standing, in spite of
displeasure, calm and motionless. Her hair was dark, and dressed
in the simplest manner, without even a reminder of the hideous
occipital structure then in favor--especially with shop women,
who in general choose for imitation and exorbitant development
whatever is ugliest and least lady-like in the fashion of the
hour. It had a natural wave in it, which broke the too straight
lines it would otherwise have made across a forehead of sweet and
composing proportions. Her features were regular--her nose
straight--perhaps a little thin; the curve of her upper lip
carefully drawn, as if with design to express a certain firmness
of modesty; and her chin well shaped, perhaps a little too
sharply defined for her years, and rather large. Everything about
her suggested the repose of order satisfied, of unconstrained
obedience to the laws of harmonious relation. The only fault
honest criticism could have suggested, merely suggested, was the
presence of just a possible _nuance_ of primness. Her boots,
at this moment unseen of any, fitted her feet, as her feet fitted
her body. Her hands were especially good. There are not many
ladies, interested in their own graces, who would not have envied
her such seals to her natural patent of ladyhood. Her speech and
manners corresponded with her person and dress; they were direct
and simple, in tone and inflection, those of one at peace with
herself. Neatness was more notable in her than grace, but grace
was not absent; good breeding was more evident than delicacy, yet
delicacy was there; and unity was plain throughout.

George went back to his own side of the shop, jumped the
counter, put the cover on the box he had left open with a bang,
and shoved it into its place as if it had been the backboard of a
cart, shouting as he did so to a boy invisible, to make haste and
put up the shutters. Mary left the shop by a door on the inside
of the counter, for she and her father lived in the house; and,
as soon as the shop was closed, George went home to the villa his
father had built in the suburbs.




CHAPTER II.

CUSTOMERS.


The next day was Saturday, a busy one at the shop. From the
neighboring villages and farms came customers not a few; and
ladies, from the country-seats around, began to arrive as the
hours went on. The whole strength of the establishment was early
called out. Busiest in serving was the senior partner, Mr.
Turnbull. He was a stout, florid man, with a bald crown, a heavy
watch-chain of the best gold festooned across the wide space
between waistcoat-button-hole and pocket, and a large
hemispheroidal carbuncle on a huge fat finger, which yet was his
little one. He was close-shaved, double-chinned, and had
cultivated an ordinary smile to such an extraordinary degree
that, to use the common hyperbole, it reached from ear to ear. By
nature he was good-tempered and genial; but, having devoted every
mental as well as physical endowment to the making of money, what
few drops of spiritual water were in him had to go with the rest
to the turning of the mill-wheel that ground the universe into
coin. In his own eyes he was a strong churchman, but the only
sign of it visible to others was the strength of his contempt for
dissenters--which, however, excepting his partner and Mary, he
showed only to church-people; a dissenter's money being, as he
often remarked, when once in his till, as good as the best
churchman's.

To the receptive eye he was a sight not soon to be forgotten, as
he bent over a piece of goods outspread before a customer, one
hand resting on the stuff, the other on the yard-measure, his
chest as nearly touching the counter as the protesting adjacent
parts would permit, his broad smooth face turned up at right
angles, and his mouth, eloquent even to solemnity on the merits
of the article, now hiding, now disclosing a gulf of white teeth.
No sooner was anything admitted into stock, than he bent his soul
to the selling of it, doing everything that could be done, saying
everything he could think of saying, short of plain lying as to
its quality: that he was not guilty of. To buy well was a care to
him, to sell well was a greater, but to make money, and that as
speedily as possible, was his greatest care, and his whole
ambition.

John Turnbull in his gig, as he drove along the road to the town,
and through the street approached his shop-door, showed to the
chance observer a man who knew himself of importance, a man who
might have a soul somewhere inside that broad waistcoat; as he
drew up, threw the reins to his stable-boy, and descended upon
the pavement--as he stepped down into the shop even, he looked a
being in whom son or daughter or friend might feel some honest
pride; but, the moment he was behind the counter and in front of
a customer, he changed to a creature whose appearance and
carriage were painfully contemptible to any beholder who loved
his kind; he had lost the upright bearing of a man, and cringed
like an ape. But I fear it was thus he had gained a portion at
least of his favor with the country-folk, many of whom much
preferred his ministrations to those of his partner. A glance,
indeed, from the one to the other, was enough to reveal which
must be the better salesman--and to some eyes which the better
man.

In the narrow walk of his commerce--behind the counter, I mean--
Mr. Marston stood up tall and straight, lank and lean, seldom
bending more than his long neck in the direction of the counter,
but doing everything needful upon it notwithstanding, from the
unusual length of his arms and his bony hands. His forehead was
high and narrow, his face pale and thin, his hair long and thin,
his nose aquiline and thin, his eyes large, his mouth and chin
small. He seldom spoke a syllable more than was needful, but his
words breathed calm respect to every customer. His conversation
with one was commonly all but over as he laid something for
approval or rejection on the counter: he had already taken every
pains to learn the precise nature of the necessity or desire; and
what he then offered he submitted without comment; if the thing
was not judged satisfactory, he removed it and brought another.
Many did not like this mode of service; they would be helped to
buy; unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed
any aid toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave
them every imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling
before them like a man whose many gods came to him one after the
other to be worshiped; while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he
presented was on the counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a
sudden calm, his visage bearing witness that his thought was
already far away--in heavenly places with his wife, or hovering
like a perplexed bee over some difficult passage in the New
Testament; Mary could have told which, for she knew the meaning
of every shadow that passed or lingered on his countenance.

His partner and his like-minded son despised him, as a matter of
course; his unbusiness-like habits, as they counted them, were
the constantly recurring theme of their scorn; and some of these
would doubtless have brought him the disapprobation of many a
business man of a moral development beyond that of Turnbull; but
Mary saw nothing in them which did not stamp her father the
superior of all other men she knew.

To mention one thing, which may serve as typical of the man: he
not unfrequently sold things under the price marked by his
partner. Against this breach of fealty to the firm Turnbull never
ceased to level his biggest guns of indignation and remonstrance,
though always without effect. He even lowered himself in his own
eyes so far as to quote Scripture like a canting dissenter, and
remind his partner of what came to a house divided against
itself. He did not see that the best thing for some houses must
be to come to pieces. "Well, but, Mr. Turnbull, I thought it was
marked too high," was the other's invariable answer. "William,
you are a fool," his partner would rejoin for the hundredth time.
"Will you never understand that, if we get a little more than the
customary profit upon one thing, we get less upon another? You
must make the thing even, or come to the workhouse." Thereto, for
the hundredth time also, William Marston would reply: "That might
hold, I daresay, Mr. Turnbull--I am not sure--if every customer
always bought an article of each of the two sorts together; but I
can't make it straight with my conscience that one customer
should pay too much because I let another pay too little.
Besides, I am not at all sure that the general scale of profit is
not set too high. I fear you and I will have to part, Mr.
Turnbull." But nothing was further from Turnbull's desire than
that he and Marston should part; he could not keep the business
going without his money, not to mention that he never doubted
Marston would straightway open another shop, and, even if he did
not undersell him, take from him all his dissenting customers;
for the junior partner was deacon of a small Baptist church in
the town--a fact which, although like vinegar to the teeth and
smoke to the eyes of John Turnbull in his villa, was invaluable
in the eyes of John Turnbull behind his counter.

Whether William Marston was right or wrong in his ideas about the
rite of baptism--probably he was both--he was certainly right in
his relation to that which alone makes it of any value--that,
namely, which it signifies; buried with his Master, he had died
to selfishness, greed, and trust in the secondary; died to evil,
and risen to good--a new creature. He was just as much a
Christian in his shop as in the chapel, in his bedroom as at the
prayer-meeting.

But the world was not now much temptation to him, and, to tell
the truth, he was getting a good deal tired of the shop. He had
to remind himself, oftener and oftener, that in the mean time it
was the work given him to do, and to take more and more
frequently the strengthening cordial of a glance across the shop
at his daughter. Such a glance passed through the dusky place
like summer lightning through a heavy atmosphere, and came to
Mary like a glad prophecy; for it told of a world within and
beyond the world, a region of love and faith, where struggled no
antagonistic desires, no counteracting aims, but unity was the
visible garment of truth.

The question may well suggest itself to my reader--How could such
a man be so unequally yoked with such another as Turnbull?--To
this I reply that Marston's greatness had yet a certain
repressive power upon the man who despised him, so that he never
uttered his worst thoughts or revealed his worst basenesses in
his presence. Marston never thought of him as my reader must soon
think--flattered himself, indeed, that poor John was gradually
improving, coming to see things more and more as he would have
him look on them. Add to this, that they had been in the business
together almost from boyhood, and much will be explained.

An open carriage, with a pair of showy but ill-matched horses,
looking unfit for country work on the one hand, as for Hyde Park
on the other, drew up at the door; and a visible wave of interest
ran from end to end of the shop, swaying as well those outside as
those inside the counter, for the carriage was well known in
Testbridge. It was that of Lady Margaret Mortimer; she did not
herself like the _Margaret_, and signed only her second name
_Alice_ at full length, whence her _friends_ generally
called her to each other Lady Malice. She did not leave the
carriage, but continued to recline motionless in it, at an angle
of forty-five degrees, wrapped in furs, for the day was cloudy
and cold, her pale handsome face looking inexpressibly more
indifferent in its regard of earth and sky and the goings of men,
than that of a corpse whose gaze is only on the inside of the
coffin-lid. But the two ladies who were with her got down. One of
them was her daughter, Hesper by name, who, from the dull, cloudy
atmosphere that filled the doorway, entered the shop like a gleam
of sunshine, dusky-golden, followed by a glowing shadow, in the
person of her cousin, Miss Yolland.

Turnbull hurried to meet them, bowing profoundly, and looking
very much like Issachar between the chairs he carried. But they
turned aside to where Mary stood, and in a few minutes the
counter was covered with various stuffs for some of the smaller
articles of ladies' attire.

The customers were hard to please, for they wanted the best
things at the price of inferior ones, and Mary noted that the
desires of the cousin were farther reaching and more expensive
than those of Miss Mortimer. But, though in this way hard to
please, they were not therefore unpleasant to deal with; and from
the moment she looked the latter in the face, whom she had not
seen since she was a girl, Mary could hardly take her eyes off
her. All at once it struck her how well the unusual, fantastic
name her mother had given her suited her; and, as she gazed, the
feeling grew.

Large, and grandly made, Hesper stood "straight, and steady, and
tall," dusky-fair, and colorless, with the carriage of a young
matron. Her brown hair seemed ever scathed and crinkled afresh by
the ethereal flame that here and there peeped from amid the
unwilling volute rolled back from her creamy forehead in a
rebellious coronet. Her eyes were large and hazel; her nose cast
gently upward, answering the carriage of her head; her mouth
decidedly large, but so exquisite in drawing and finish that the
loss of a centimetre of its length would to a lover have been as
the loss of a kingdom; her chin a trifle large, and grandly
lined; for a woman's, her throat was massive, and her arms and
hands were powerful. Her expression was frank, almost brave, her
eyes looking full at the person she addressed. As she gazed, a
kind of love she had never felt before kept swelling in Mary's
heart.

Her companion impressed her very differently.

Some men, and most women, counted Miss Yolland _strangely_
ugly. But there were men who exceedingly admired her. Not very
slight for her stature, and above the middle height, she looked
small beside Hesper. Her skin was very dark, with a considerable
touch of sallowness; her eyes, which were large and beautifully
shaped, were as black as eyes could be, with light in the midst
of their blackness, and more than a touch of hardness in the
midst of their liquidity; her eyelashes were singularly long and
black, and she seemed conscious of them every time they rose. She
did not _use_ her eyes habitually, but, when she did, the
thrust was sudden and straight. I heard a man once say that a
look from her was like a volley of small-arms. Like Hesper's, her
mouth was large and good, with fine teeth; her chin projected a
little too much; her hands were finer than Hesper's, but bony.
Her name was Septimia; Lady Margaret called her Sepia, and the
contraction seemed to so many suitable that it was ere long
generally adopted. She was in mourning, with a little crape. To
the first glance she seemed as unlike Hesper as she could well
be; but, as she stood gently regarding the two, Mary, gradually,
and to her astonishment, became indubitably aware of a singular
likeness between them. Sepia, being a few years older, and in
less flourishing condition, had her features sharper and finer,
and by nature her complexion was darker by shades innumerable;
but, if the one was the evening, the other was the night: Sepia
was a diminished and overshadowed Hesper. Their manner, too, was
similar, but Sepia's was the haughtier, and she had an occasional
look of defiance, of which there appeared nothing in Hesper. When
first she came to Durnmelling, Lady Malice had once alluded to
the dependence of her position--but only once: there came a flash
into rather than out of Sepia's eyes that made any repetition of
the insult impossible and Lady Malice wish that she had left her
a wanderer on the face of Europe.

Sepia was the daughter of a clergyman, an uncle of Lady Malice,
whose sons had all gone to the bad, and whose daughters had all
vanished from society. Shortly before the time at which my
narrative begins, one of the latter, however, namely Sepia, the
youngest, had reappeared, a fragment of the family wreck,
floating over the gulf of its destruction. Nobody knew with any
certainty where she had been in the interim: nobody at
Durnmelling knew anything but what she chose to tell, and that
was not much. She said she had been a governess in Austrian
Poland and Russia. Lady Margaret had become reconciled to her
presence, and Hesper attached to her.

Of the men who, as I have said, admired her, some felt a peculiar
enchantment in what they called her ugliness; others declared her
devilish handsome; and some shrank from her as if with an
undefined dread of perilous entanglement, if she should but catch
them looking her in the face. Among some of them she was known as
Lucifer, in antithesis to Hesper: they meant the Lucifer of
darkness, not the light-bringer of the morning.

The ladies, on their part, especially Hesper, were much pleased
with Mary. The simplicity of her address and manner, the pains
she took to find the exact thing she wanted, and the modest
decision with which she answered any reference to her, made
Hesper even like her. The most artificially educated of women is
yet human, and capable of even more than liking a fellow-creature
as such. When their purchases were ended, she took her leave with
a kind smile, which went on glowing in Mary's heart long after
she had vanished.

"Home, John," said Lady Margaret, the moment the two ladies were
seated. "I hope you have got _all_ you wanted. We shall be
late for luncheon, I fear. I would not for worlds keep Mr.
Redmain waiting.--A little faster, John, please."

Hesper's face darkened. Sepia eyed her fixedly, from under the
mingling of ascended lashes and descended brows. The coachman
pretended to obey, but the horses knew very well when he did and
when he did not mean them to go, and took not a step to the
minute more: John had regard to the splendid-looking black horse
on the near side, which was weak in the wind, as well as on one
fired pastern, and cared little for the anxiety of his mistress.
To him, horses were the final peak of creation--or if not the
horses, the coachman, whose they are--masters and mistresses the
merest parasitical adjuncts. He got them home in good time for
luncheon, notwithstanding--more to Lady Margaret's than Hesper's
satisfaction.

Mr. Redmain was a bachelor of fifty, to whom Lady Margaret was
endeavoring to make the family agreeable, in the hope he might
take Hesper off their hands. I need not say he was rich. He was a
common man, with good cold manners, which he offered you like a
handle. He was selfish, capable of picking up a lady's
handkerchief, but hardly a wife's. He was attentive to Hesper;
but she scarcely concealed such a repugnance to him as some feel
at sight of strange fishes--being at the same time afraid of him,
which was not surprising, as she could hardly fail to perceive
the fate intended for her.

"Ain't Miss Mortimer a stunner?" said George Turnbull to Mary,
when the tide of customers had finally ebbed from the shop.

"I don't exactly know what you mean, George," answered Mary.

"Oh, of course, I know it ain't fair to ask any girl to admire
another," said George. "But there's no offense to you, Mary. One
young lady can't carry _every_ merit on her back. She'd be
too lovely to live, you know. Miss Mortimer ain't got your waist,
nor she ain't got your 'ands, nor your 'air; and you ain't got
her size, nor the sort of hair she 'as with her."

He looked up from the piece of leno he was smoothing out, and saw
he was alone in the shop.




CHAPTER III.

THE ARBOR AT THORNWICK.


The next day was Sunday at last, a day dear to all who do
anything like their duty in the week, whether they go to church
or not. For Mary, she went to the Baptist chapel; it was her
custom, rendered holy by the companionship of her father. But
this day it was with more than ordinary restlessness and lack of
interest that she stood, knelt, and sat, through the routine of
observance; for old Mr. Duppa was certainly duller than usual:
how could it be otherwise, when he had been preparing to spend a
mortal hour in descanting on the reasons which necessitated the
separation of all true Baptists from all brother-believers? The
narrow, high-souled little man--for a soul as well as a forehead
can be both high and narrow--was dull that morning because he
spoke out of his narrowness, and not out of his height; and Mary
was better justified in feeling bored than even when George
Turnbull plagued her with his vulgar attentions. When she got out
at last, sedate as she was, she could hardly help skipping along
the street by her father's side. Far better than chapel was their
nice little cold dinner together, in their only sitting-room,
redolent of the multifarious goods piled around it on all the
rest of the floor. Greater yet was the following pleasure--of
making her father lie down on the sofa, and reading him to sleep,
after which she would doze a little herself, and dream a little,
in the great chair that had been her grandmother's. Then they had
their tea, and then her father always went to see the minister
before chapel in the evening.

When he was gone, Mary would put on her pretty straw bonnet, and
set out to visit Letty Lovel at Thornwick. Some of the church-
members thought this habit of taking a walk, instead of going
again to the chapel, very worldly, and did not scruple to let her
know their opinion; but, so long as her father was satisfied with
her, Mary did not care a straw for the world besides. She was too
much occupied with obedience to trouble her head about opinion,
either her own or other people's. Not until a question comes
puzzling and troubling us so as to paralyze the energy of our
obedience is there any necessity for its solution, or any
probability of finding a real one. A thousand foolish
_doctrines_ may lie unquestioned in the mind, and never
interfere with the growth or bliss of him who lives in active
subordination of his life to the law of life: obedience will in
time exorcise them, like many another worse devil.

It had drizzled all the morning from the clouds as well as from
the pulpit, but, just as Mary stepped out of the kitchen-door,
the sun stepped out of the last rain-cloud. She walked quickly
from the town, eager for the fields and the trees, but in some
dread of finding Tom Helmer at the stile; for he was such a fool,
she said to herself, that there was no knowing what he might do,
for all she had said; but he had thought better of it, and she
was soon crossing meadows and cornfields in peace, by a path
which, with many a winding, and many an up and down, was the
nearest way to Thornwick.

The saints of old did well to pray God to lift on them the light
of his countenance: has the Christian of the new time learned of
his Master that the clouds and the sunshine come and go of
themselves? If the sunshine fills the hearts of old men and babes
and birds with gladness and praise, and God never meant it, then
are they all idolaters, and have but a careless Father. Sweet
earthy odors rose about Mary from the wet ground; the rain-drops
glittered on the grass and corn-blades and hedgerows; a soft damp
wind breathed rather than blew about the gaps and gates; with an
upward springing, like that of a fountain momently gathering
strength, the larks kept shooting aloft, there, like music-
rockets, to explode in showers of glowing and sparkling song;
while, all the time and over all, the sun as he went down kept
shining in the might of his peace; and the heart of Mary praised
her Father in heaven.

Where the narrow path ran westward for a little way, so that she
could see nothing for the sun in her eyes, in the middle of a
plowed field she would have run right against a gentleman, had he
been as blind as she; but, his back being to the sun, he saw her
perfectly, and stepped out of her way into the midst of a patch
of stiff soil, where the rain was yet lying between the furrows.
She saw him then, and as, lifting his hat, he stopped again upon
the path, she recognized Mr. Wardour.

"Oh, your nice boots!" she cried, in the childlike distress of a
simple soul discovering itself the cause of catastrophe, for his
boots were smeared all over with yellow clay.

"It only serves me right," returned Mr. Wardour, with a laugh of
amusement. "I oughtn't to have put on such thin ones at the first
smile of summer."

Again he lifted his hat, and walked on.

Mary also pursued her path, genuinely though gently pained that
one should have stepped up to the ankles in mud on her account.
As I have already said, except in the shop she had never before
spoken to Mr. Wardour, and, although he had so simply responded
to her exclamation, he did not even know who she was.

The friendship which now drew Mary to Thornwick, Godfrey
Wardour's place, was not one of long date. She and Letty Lovel
had, it is true, known each other for years, but only quite of
late had their acquaintance ripened into something better; and it
was not without protestation on the part of Mrs. Wardour,
Godfrey's mother, that she had seen the growth of an intimacy
between the two young women. The society of a shopwoman, she
often remarked, was far from suitable for one who, as the
daughter of a professional man, might lay claim to the position
of a gentlewoman. For Letty was the orphan daughter of a country
surgeon, a cousin of Mrs. Wardour, for whom she had had a great
liking while yet they were boy and girl together. At the same
time, however much she would have her consider herself the
superior of Mary Marston, she by no means treated her as her own
equal, and Letty could not help being afraid of her aunt, as she
called her.

The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the
one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending
devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for
it; and Letty, although the child of a loved cousin, must not
presume upon that, or forget that the wife and mother of long-
descended proprietors of certain acres of land was greatly the
superior of any man who lived by the exercise of the best-
educated and most helpful profession. She counted herself a
devout Christian, but her ideas of rank, at least--therefore
certainly not a few others--were absolutely opposed to the
Master's teaching: they who did least for others were her
aristocracy.

Now, Letty was a simple, true-hearted girl, rather slow, who
honestly tried to understand her aunt's position with regard to
her friend. "Shop-girls," her aunt had said, "are not fitting
company for you, Letty."

"I do not know any other shop-girls, aunt," Letty replied, with
hidden trembling; "but, if they are not nice, then they are not
like Mary. She's downright good; indeed she is, aunt!--a great
deal, ever so much, better than I am."

"That may well be," answered Mrs. Wardour, "but it does not make
a lady of her."

"I am sure," returned Letty, bewildered, "on Sundays you could
not tell the difference between her and any other young lady."

"Any other well-dressed young woman, my dear, you should say. I
believe shop-girls do call their companions young ladies, but
that can not justify the application of the word. I am scarcely
bound to speak of my cook as a lady because letters come
addressed to her as Miss Tozer. If the word 'lady' should sink at
last to common use, as in Italy every woman is Donna, we must
find some other word to ex-press what _used_ to be meant by
it."

"Is Mrs. Cropper a lady, aunt?" asked Letty, after a pause, in
which her brains, which were not half so muddled as she thought
them, had been busy feeling after firm ground in the morass of
social distinction thus opened under her.

"She is received as such," replied Mrs. Wardour, but with doubled
stiffness, through which ran a tone of injury.

"Would you receive her, aunt, if she called upon you?"

"She has horses and servants, and everything a woman of the world
can desire; but I should feel I was bowing the knee to Mammon
were I to ask her to my house. Yet such is the respect paid to
money in these degenerate days that many a one will court the
society of a person like that, who would think me or your cousin
Godfrey unworthy of notice, because we have no longer a tithe of
the property the family once possessed."

The lady forgot there is a Rimmon as well as a Mammon.

"God knows," she went on, "how that woman's husband made his
money! But that is a small matter nowadays, except to old-
fashioned people like myself. Not _how_ but _how much_,
is all the question now," she concluded, flattering herself she
had made a good point.

"Don't think me rude, please, aunt: I am really wishing to
understand--but, if Mrs. Cropper is not a lady, how can Mary
Marston not be one? She is as different from Mrs. Croppor as one
woman can be from another."

"Because she has not the position in society," replied Mrs.
Wardour, enveloping her nothing in flimsy reiteration and self-
contradiction.

"And Mrs. Cropper has the position?" ventured Letty, with a
little palpitation from fear of offending.

"Apparently so," answered Mrs. Wardour. But her inquiring pupil
did not feel much enlightened. Letty had not the logic necessary
to the thinking of the thing out; or to the discovery that, like
most social difficulties, hers was merely one of the upper strata
of a question whose foundation lies far too deep for what is
called Society to perceive its very existence. And hence it is no
wonder that Society, abetted by the Church, should go on from
generation to generation talking murderous platitudes about it.

But, although such was her reasoning beforehand, heart had so far
overcome habit and prejudice with Mrs. Wardour, that, convinced
on the first interview of the high tone and good influence of
Mary, she had gradually come to put herself in the way of seeing
her as often as she came, ostensibly to herself that she might
prevent any deterioration of intercourse; and although she
always, on these occasions, played the grand lady, with a
stateliness that seemed to say, "Because of your individual
worth, I condescend, and make an exception, but you must not
imagine I receive your class at Thornwick," she had almost
entirely ceased making remarks upon the said class in Letty's
hearing.

On her part, Letty had by this time grown so intimate with Mary
as to open with her the question upon which her aunt had given
her so little satisfaction; and this same Sunday afternoon, as
they sat in the arbor at the end of the long yew hedge in the old
garden, it had come up again between them; for, set thinking by
Letty's bewilderment, Mary had gone on thinking, and had at
length laid hold of the matter, at least by the end that belonged
to _her_.

"I can not consent, Letty," she said, "to trouble my mind about
it as you do. I can not afford it. Society is neither my master
nor my servant, neither my father nor my sister; and so long as
she does not bar my way to the kingdom of heaven, which is the
only society worth getting into, I feel no right to complain of
how she treats me. I have no claim on her; I do not acknowledge
her laws--hardly her existence, and she has no authority over me.
Why should she, how could she, constituted as she is, receive
such as me? The moment she did so, she would cease to be what she
is; and, if all be true that one hears of her, she does me a
kindness in excluding me. What can it matter to me, Letty,
whether they call me a lady or not, so long as Jesus says
_Daughter_ to me? It reminds me of what I heard my father
say once to Mr. Turnbull, when he had been protesting that none
but church people ought to be buried in the churchyards. 'I don't
care a straw about it, Mr. Turnbull,' he said. 'The Master was
buried in a garden.'--'Ah, but you see things are different now,'
said Mr. Turnbull.--'I don't hang by things, but by my Master. It
is enough for the disciple that he should be as his Master,' said
my father.--'Besides, you don't think it of any real consequence
yourself, or you would never want to keep your brothers and
sisters out of such nice quiet places!'--Mr. Turnbull gave his
kind of grunt, and said no more."

After passing Mary, Mr. Wardour did not go very far before he
began to slacken his pace; a moment or two more and he suddenly
wheeled round, and began to walk back toward Thornwick. Two
things had combined to produce this change of purpose--the first,
the state of his boots, which, beginning to dry in the sun and
wind as he walked, grew more and more hideous at the end of his
new gray trousers; the other, the occurring suspicion that the
girl must be Letty's new shopkeeping friend, Miss Marston, on her
way to visit her. What a sweet, simple young woman she was! he
thought; and straightway began to argue with himself that, as his
boots were in such evil plight, it would be more pleasant to
spend the evening with Letty and her friend, than to hold on his
way to his own friend's, and spend the evening smoking and
lounging about the stable, or hearing his sister play polkas and
mazurkas all the still Sunday twilight.

Mary had, of course, upon her arrival, narrated her small
adventure, and the conversation had again turned upon Godfrey
just as he was nearing the house.

"How handsome your cousin is!" said Mary, with the simplicity
natural to her.

"Do you think so?" returned Letty.

"Don't _you_ think so?" rejoined Mary.

"I have never thought about it," answered Letty.

"He looks so manly, and has such a straightforward way with him!"
said Mary.

"What one sees every day, she may feel in a sort of take-for-
granted way, without thinking about it," said Letty. "But, to
tell the truth, I should feel it as impertinent of me to
criticise Cousin Godfrey's person as to pass an opinion on one of
the books he reads. I can not express the reverence I have for
Cousin Godfrey."

"I don't wonder," replied Mary. "There is that about him one
could trust."

"There is that about him," returned Letty, "makes me afraid of
him--I can not tell why. And yet, though everybody, even his
mother, is as anxious to please him as if he were an emperor, he
is the easiest person to please in the whole house. Not that he
tells you he is pleased; he only smiles; but that is quite
enough."

"But I suppose he talks to you sometimes?" said Mary.

"Oh, yes--now. He used not; but I think he does now more than to
anybody else. It was a long time before he began, though. Now he
is always giving me something to read. I wish he wouldn't; it
frightens me dreadfully. He always questions me, to know whether
I understand what I read."

Letty ended with a little cry. Through the one narrow gap in the
yew hedge, near to the arbor, Godfrey had entered the walk, and
was coming toward them.

He was a well-made man, thirty years of age, rather tall, sun-
tanned, and bearded, with wavy brown hair, and gentle approach.
His features were not regular, but that is of little consequence
where there is unity. His face indicated faculty and feeling, and
there was much good nature, shadowed with memorial suffering, in
the eyes which shone so blue out of the brown.

Mary rose respectfully as he drew near.

"What treason were you talking, Letty, that you were so startled
at sight of me?" he said, with a smile. "You were complaining of
me as a hard master, were you not?"

"No, indeed, Cousin Godfrey!" answered Letty energetically, not
without tremor, and coloring as she spoke. "I was only saying I
could not help being frightened when you asked me questions about
what I had been reading. I am so stupid, you know!"

"Pardon me, Letty," returned her cousin, "I know nothing of the
sort. Allow me to say you are very far from stupid. Nobody can
understand everything at first sight. But you have not introduced
me to your friend."

Letty bashfully murmured the names of the two.

"I guessed as much," said Wardour. "Pray sit down, Miss Marston.
For the sake of your dresses, I will go and change my boots. May
I come and join you after?"

"Please do, Cousin Godfrey; and bring something to read to us,"
said Letty, who wanted her friend to admire her cousin. "It's
Sunday, you know."

"Why you should be afraid of him, I can't think," said Mary, when
his retreating steps had ceased to sound on the gravel. "He is
delightful!"

"I don't like to look stupid," said Letty.

"I shouldn't mind how stupid I looked so long as I was learning,"
returned Mary. "I wonder you never told me about him!"

"I couldn't talk about Cousin Godfrey," said Letty; and a pause
followed.

"How good of him to come to us again!" said Mary. "What will he
read to us?"

"Most likely something out of a book you never heard of before,
and can't remember the name of when you have heard it--at least
that's the way with me. I wonder if he will talk to you, Mary? I
should like to hear how Cousin Godfrey talks to girls."

"Why, you know how he talks to you," said Mary.

"Oh, but I am only Cousin Letty! He can talk anyhow to me."

"By your own account he talks to you in the best possible way."

"Yes; I dare say; but--"

"But what?"

"I can't help wishing sometimes he would talk a little nonsense.
It would be such a relief. I am sure I should understand better
if he would. I shouldn't be so frightened at him then."

"The way I generally hear gentlemen talk to girls makes me
ashamed--makes me feel as if I must ask, 'Is it that you are a
fool, or that you take that girl for one?' They never talk so to
me."

Letty sat pulling a jonquil to pieces. She looked up. Her eyes
were full of thought, but she paused a long time before she
spoke, and, when she did, it was only to say:

"I fear, Mary, I should take any man for a fool who took me for
anything else."

Letty was a rather small and rather freckled girl, with the
daintiest of rounded figures, a good forehead, and fine clear
brown eyes. Her mouth was not pretty, except when she smiled--and
she did not smile often. When she did, it was not unfrequently
with the tears in her eyes, and then she looked lovely. In her
manner there was an indescribably taking charm, of which it is
not easy to give an impression; but I think it sprang from a
constitutional humility, partly ruined into a painful and
haunting sense of inferiority, for which she imagined herself to
blame. Hence there dwelt in her eyes an appeal which few hearts
could resist. When they met another's, they seemed to say: "I am
nobody; but you need not kill me; I am not pretending to be
anybody. I will try to do what you want, but I am not clever.
Only I am sorry for it. Be gentle with me." To Godfrey, at least,
her eyes spoke thus.

In ten minutes or so he reappeared, far at the other end of the
yew-walk, approaching slowly, with a book, in which he seemed
thoughtfully searching as he came. When they saw him the girls
instinctively moved farther from each other, making large room
for him between them, and when he came up he silently took the
place thus silently assigned him.

"I am going to try your brains now, Letty," he said, and tapped
the book with a finger.

"Oh, please don't!" pleaded Letty, as if he had been threatening
her with a small amputation, or the loss of a front tooth.

"Yes," he persisted; "and not your brains only, Letty, but your
heart, and all that is in you."

At this even Mary could not help feeling a little frightened; and
she was glad there was no occasion for her to speak.

With just a word of introduction, Godfrey read Carlyle's
translation of that finest of Jean Paul's dreams in which he sets
forth the condition of a godless universe all at once awakened to
the knowledge of the causelessness of its own existence. Slowly,
with due inflection and emphasis--slowly, but without pause for
thought or explanation--he read to the end, ceased suddenly, and
lifted his eyes.

"There, Letty," he said, "what do you think of that? There's a
bit of Sunday reading for you!"

Letty was looking altogether perplexed, and not a little
frightened.

"I don't understand a word of it," she answered, gulping back her
tears. He glanced at Mary. She was white as death, her lips
quivered, and from her eyes shot a keen light that seemed to
lacerate their blue.

"It is terrible!" she said. "I never read anything like that."

"There _is_ nothing like it," he answered.

"But the author is a Unitarian, is he not?" remarked Mary--for
she heard plenty of theology, if not much Christianity, in her
chapel.

Godfrey looked at her, then at the book for a moment.

"That may merely seem, from the necessity of the supposition," he
answered; and read again:

"'Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of
uneffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried
out, "Christ! is there no God?" He answered, "There is none!" The
whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and
one after the other all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces.'
--"You see," he went on, "that if there be no God, Christ can only
be the first of men."

"I understand," said Mary.

"Do you really then, Mary?" said Letty, looking at her with
wondering admiration.

"I only meant," answered Mary--"but," she went on, interrupting
herself, "I do think I understand it a little. If Mr. Wardour
would be kind enough to read it through again!"

"With much pleasure," answered Godfrey, casting on her a glance
of pleased surprise.

The second reading affected Mary more than the first--because, of
course, she took in more. And this time a glimmer of meaning
broke on the slower mind of Letty: as her cousin read the
passage, "Oh, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children
who had been awakened in the Churchyard, into the temple, and
cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said,
'Jesus, have we no Father?' And he answered, with streaming
tears: 'We are all orphans, I and you; we are without Father!'"--
at this point Letty gave her little cry, then bit her lip, as if
she had said something wrong.

All the time a great bee kept buzzing in and out of the arbor,
and Mary vaguely wondered how it could be so careless.

"I can't be dead stupid after all, Cousin Godfrey," said Letty,
with broken voice, when once more he ceased, and, as she spoke,
she pressed her hand on her heart, "for something kept going
through and through me; but I can not say yet I understand it.--
If you will lend me the book," she continued, "I will read it
over again before I go to bed."

He shut the volume, handed it to her, and began to talk about
something else.

Mary rose to go.

"You will take tea with us, I hope, Miss Marston," said Godfrey.

But Mary would not. What she had heard was working in her mind
with a powerful fermentation, and she longed to be alone. In the
fields, as she walked, she would come to an understanding with
herself.

She knew almost nothing of the higher literature, and felt like a
dreamer who, in the midst of a well-known and ordinary landscape,
comes without warning upon the mighty cone of a mountain, or the
breaking waters of a boundless ocean.

"If one could but get hold of such things, what a glorious life
it would be!" she thought. She had looked into a world beyond the
present, and already in the present all things were new. The sun
set as she had never seen him set before; it was only in gray and
gold, with scarce a touch of purple and rose; the wind visited
her cheek like a living thing, and loved her; the skylarks had
more than reason in their jubilation. For the first time she
heard the full chord of intellectual and emotional delight. What
a place her chamber would be, if she could there read such
things! How easy would it be then to bear the troubles of the
hour, the vulgar humor of Mr. Turnbull, and the tiresome
attentions of George! Would Mr. Wardour lend her the book? Had he
other books as good? Were there many books to make one's heart go
as that one did? She would save every penny to buy such books, if
indeed such treasures were within her reach! Under the
enchantment of her first literary joy, she walked home like one
intoxicated with opium--a being possessed for the time with the
awful imagination of a grander soul, and reveling in the presence
of her loftier kin.




CHAPTER IV.

GODFREY WARDOUR.


The property of which Thornwick once formed a part was then large
and important; but it had, by not very slow degrees, generation
following generation of unthrift, dwindled and shrunk and
shriveled, until at last it threatened to disappear from the
family altogether, like a spark upon burnt paper. Then came one
into possession who had some element of salvation in him;
Godfrey's father not only held the poor remnant together, but,
unable to add to it, improved it so greatly that at length, in
the midst of the large properties around, it resembled the
diamond that hearts a disk of inferior stones. Doubtless, could
he have used his wife's money, he would have spent it on land;
but it was under trustees for herself and her children, and
indeed would not have gone far in the purchase of English soil.

Considerably advanced in years before he thought of marrying, he
died while Godfrey, whom he intended bringing up to a profession,
was yet a child; and his widow, carrying out his intention, had
educated the boy with a view to the law. Godfrey, however, had
positively declined entering on the studies special to a career
he detested; nor was it difficult to reconcile his mother to the
enforced change of idea, when she found that his sole desire was
to settle down with her, and manage the two hundred acres his
father had left him. He took his place in the county, therefore,
as a yeoman-farmer--none the less a gentleman by descent,
character, and education. But while in genuine culture and
refinement the superior of all the landed proprietors in the
neighborhood, and knowing it, he was the superior of most of them
in this also, that he counted it no derogation from the dignity
he valued to put his hands upon occasion to any piece of work
required about the place.

His nature was too large, however, and its needs therefore too
many, to allow of his spending his energies on the property; and
he did not brood over such things as, so soon as they become
cares, become despicable. How much time is wasted in what is
called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the
fancied probabilities of result! Of this fault, I say, Godfrey
was not guilty--more, however, I must confess, from healthful
drawings in other directions, than from philosophy or wisdom: he
was _a reader_--not in the sense of a man who derives
intensest pleasure from the absorption of intellectual pabulum--
one not necessarily so superior as some imagine to the
_gourmet_, or even the _gourmand_: in his reading Godfrey
nourished certain of the higher tendencies of his nature--
read with a constant reference to his own views of life, and the
confirmation, change, or enlargement of his theories of the same;
but neither did he read with the highest aim of all--the
enlargement of reverence, obedience, and faith; for he had never
turned his face full in the direction of infinite growth--the
primal end of a man's being, who is that he may return to the
Father, gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple
instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits,
he was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went
calmly on, bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled
either by anxiety or ambition.

To the forecasting affection of a mother, the hour when she must
yield the first place both in her son's regards and in the house-
affairs could not but have often presented itself, in doubt and
pain--perhaps dread. Only as year after year passed and Godfrey
revealed no tendency toward marriage, her anxiety changed sides,
and she began to fear lest with Godfrey the ancient family should
come to an end. As yet, however, finding no response to covert
suggestion, she had not ventured to speak openly to him on the
subject. All the time, I must add, she had never thought of Letty
either as thwarting or furthering her desires, for in truth she
felt toward her as one on whom Godfrey could never condescend to
look, save with the kindness suitable for one immeasurably below
him. As to what might pass in Letty's mind, Mrs. Wardour had
neither curiosity nor care: else she might possibly have been
more considerate than to fall into the habit of talking to her in
such swelling words of maternal pride that, even if she had not
admired him of herself, Letty could hardly escape coming to
regard her cousin Godfrey as the very first of men.

It added force to the veneration of both mother and cousin--for
it was nothing less than veneration in either--that there was
about Godfrey an air of the inexplicable, or at least the
unknown, and therefore mysterious. This the elder woman, not
without many a pang at her exclusion from his confidence,
attributed, and correctly, to some passage in his life at the
university; to the younger it appeared only as greatness self-
veiled from the ordinary world: to such as she, could be
vouchsafed only an occasional peep into the gulf of his
knowledge, the grandeur of his intellect, and the
imperturbability of his courage.

The passage in Godfrey's life to which I have referred as vaguely
suspected by his mother, I need not present in more than merest
outline: it belongs to my history only as a component part of the
soil whence it springs, and as in some measure necessary to the
understanding of Godfrey's character. In the last year of his
college life he had formed an attachment, the precise nature of
which I do not know. What I do know is, that the bonds of it were
rudely broken, and of the story nothing remained but
disappointment and pain, doubt and distrust. Godfrey had most
likely cherished an overweening notion of the relative value of
the love he gave; but being his, I am certain it was genuine--by
that, I mean a love with no small element of the everlasting in
it. The woman who can cast such a love from her is not likely to
meet with such another. But with this one I have nothing to do.

It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart,
but in that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the
keener in consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine,
which no stranger could have suspected beneath the manner he
wore. Under that bronzed countenance, with its firm-set mouth and
powerful jaw--below that clear blue eye, and that upright easy
carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted by a sense of wrong: he
who is not perfect in forgiveness must be haunted thus; he only
is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon
the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer, "Forgive us our
trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of
wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak
sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of them
the children of Philautos, not of Agape. But there was no hate,
no revenge, in Godfrey, and, I repeat, his weakness he kept
concealed. It must have been in his eyes, but eyes are hard to
read. For the rest, his was a strong poetic nature--a nature
which half unconsciously turned ever toward the best, away from
the mean judgments of common men, and with positive loathing from
the ways of worldly women. Never was peace endangered between his
mother and him, except when she chanced to make use of some evil
maxim which she thought experience had taught her, and the look
her son cast upon her stung her to the heart, making her for a
moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians call the
unpardonable sin. When he rose and walked from the room without a
word, she would feel as if abandoned to her wickedness, and be
miserable until she saw him again. Something like a spring-
cleaning would begin and go on in her for some time after, and
her eyes would every now and then steal toward her judge with a
glance of awe and fearful apology. But, however correct Godfrey
might be in his judgment of the worldly, that judgment was less
inspired by the harmonies of the universe than by the discords
that had jarred his being and the poisonous shocks he had
received in the encounter of the noble with the ignoble. There
was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the love of the
truth for the truth's sake. He had the fault of thinking too well
of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart
from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond
him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected,
self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of
whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the
virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his
astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At
the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so
displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon
betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result.
The point on which the swift-revolving top of his thinking and
feeling turned was as yet his present conscious self, as a thing
that was and would be, not as a thing that had to become.
Naturally the pivot had worn a socket, and such socket is sure to
be a sore. His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great
imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the
evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a
constrained exterior.




CHAPTER V.

GODFREY AND LETTY.


Godfrey, being an Englishman, and with land of his own, could not
fail to be fond of horses. For his own use he kept two--an
indulgence disproportioned to his establishment; for, although
precise in his tastes as to equine toilet, he did not feel
justified in the keeping of a groom for their use only. Hence it
came that, now and then, strap and steel, as well as hide and
hoof, would get partially neglected; and his habits in the use of
his horses being fitful--sometimes, it would be midnight even,
when he scoured from his home, seeking the comfort of desert as
well as solitary places--it is not surprising if at times, going
to the stable to saddle one, he should find its gear not in the
spick-and-span condition alone to his mind. It might then well
happen there was no one near to help him, and there be nothing
for it but to put his own hands to the work: he was too just to
rouse one who might be nowise to blame, or send a maid to fetch
him from field or barn, where he might be more importantly
engaged.

One night, meaning to start for a long ride early in the morning,
he had gone to the stable to see how things were; and, soon
after, it happened that Letty, attending to some duty before
going to bed, caught sight of him cleaning his stirrups: from
that moment she took upon herself the silent and unsuspected
supervision of the harness-room, where, when she found any part
of the riding-equipments neglected, she would draw a pair of
housemaid's gloves on her pretty hands, and polish away like a
horse-boy.

Godfrey had begun to remark how long it was since he had found
anything unfit, and to wonder at the improvement somewhere in the
establishment, when, going hastily one morning, some months
before the date of my narrative, into the harness-room to get a
saddle, he came upon Letty, who had imagined him afield with the
men: she was energetic upon a stirrup with a chain-polisher. He
started back in amazement, but she only looked up and smiled.

"I shall have done in a moment, Cousin Godfrey," she said, and
polished away harder than before.

"But, Letty! I can't allow you to do things like that. What on
earth put it in your head? Work like that is only for horny
hands."

"Your hands ain't horny, Cousin Godfrey. They may be a little
harder than mine--they wouldn't be much good if they weren't--but
they're no fitter by nature to clean stirrups. Is it for me to
sit with mine in my lap, and yours at this? I know better."

"Why shouldn't I clean my own harness, Letty, if I like?" said
Godfrey, who could not help feeling pleased as well as annoyed;
in this one moment Letty had come miles nearer him.

"Oh, surely! if you like, Cousin Godfrey," she answered; "but do
you like?"

"Better than to see you doing it."

"But not better than I like to do it; that I am sure of. It is
hands that write poetry that are not fit for work like this."

"How do you know I write poetry?" asked Godfrey, displeased, for
she touched here a sensitive spot.

"Oh, don't be angry with me!" she said, letting the stirrup fall
on the floor, and clasping her great wash-leather gloves
together; "I couldn't help seeing it was poetry, for it lay on
the table when I went to do your room."

"Do my room, Letty! Does my mother--?"

"She doesn't want to make a fine lady of me, and I shouldn't like
it if she did. I have no head, but I have pretty good hands. Of
course, Cousin Godfrey, I didn't read a word of the poetry. I
daredn't do that, however much I might have wished."

A childlike simplicity looked out of the clear eyes and sounded
in the swift words of the maiden; and, had Godfrey's heart been
as hard as the stirrup she had dropped, it could not but be
touched by her devotion. He was at the same time not a little
puzzled how to carry himself. Letty had picked up the stirrup,
and was again hard at work with it; to take it from her, and turn
her out of the saddle-room, would scarcely be a proper way of
thanking her, scarcely an adequate mode of revealing his estimate
of the condescension of her ladyhood. For, although Letty did
make beds and chose to clean harness, Godfrey was gentleman
enough not to think her less of a lady--for the moment at least--
because of such doings: I will not say he had got so far on in
the great doctrine concerning the washing of hands as to be able
to think her _more_ of a lady for thus cleaning his
stirrups. But he did see that to set the fire-engine of indignant
respect for womankind playing on the individual woman was not the
part of the man to whose service she was humbling herself. He
laid his hand on her bent head, and said:

"I ought to be a knight of the old times, Letty, to have a lady
serve me so."

"You're just as good, Cousin Godfrey," she rejoined, rubbing
away.

He turned from her, and left her at her work.

He had taken no real notice of the girl before--had felt next to
no interest in her. Neither did he feel much now, save as owing
her something beyond mere acknowledgment. But was there anything
now he could do for her--anything in her he could help? He did
not know. What she really was, he could not tell. She was a
fresh, bright girl--that he seemed to have just discovered; and,
as she sat polishing the stirrup, her hair shaken about her
shoulders, she looked engaging; but whether she was one he could
do anything for that was worth doing, was hardly the less a
question for those discoveries.

"There must be _something_ in the girl!" he said to himself
--then suddenly reflected that he had never seen a book in her
hand, except her prayer-book; how _was_ he to do anything
for a girl like that? For Godfrey knew no way of doing people
good without the intervention of books. How could he get near one
that had no taste for the quintessence of humanity? How was he to
offer her the only help he had, when she desired no such help?
"But," he continued, reflecting further, "she may have thirsted,
may even now be athirst, without knowing that books are the
bottles of the water of life!" Perhaps, if he could make her
drink once, she would drink again. The difficulty was, to find
out what sort of spiritual drink would be most to her taste, and
would most entice her to more. There must be some seeds lying
cold and hard in her uncultured garden; what water would soonest
make them grow? Not all the waters of Damascus will turn mere
sand sifted of eternal winds into fruitful soil; but Letty's soul
could not be such. And then literature has seed to sow as well as
water for the seed sown. Letty's foolish words about the hands
that wrote poetry showed a shadow of respect for poetry--except,
indeed, the girl had been but making game of him, which he was
far from ready to believe, and for which, he said to himself, her
face was at the time much too earnest, and her hands much too
busy; he must find out whether she had any instincts, any
predilections, in the matter of poetry!

Thus pondering, he forgot all about his projected ride, and,
going up to the study he had contrived for himself in the
rambling roof of the ancient house, began looking along the backs
of his books, in search of some suggestion of how to approach
Letty; his glance fell on a beautifully bound volume of verse--a
selection of English lyrics, made with tolerable judgment--which
he had bought to give, but the very color of which, every time
his eye flitting along the book-shelves caught it, threw a faint
sickness over his heart, preluding the memory of old pain and
loss:

"It may as well serve some one," he said, and, taking it down,
carried it with him to the saddle-room.

Letty was not there, and the perfect order of the place somehow
made him feel she had been gone some time. He went in search of
her; she might be in the dairy.

That was the very picture of an old-fashioned English dairy--
green-shadowy, dark, dank, and cool--floored with great irregular
slabs, mostly of green serpentine, polished into smooth hollows
by the feet of generations of mistresses and dairy-maids. Its
only light came through a small window shaded with shrubs and
ivy, which stood open, and let in the scents of bud and blossom,
weaving a net of sweetness in the gloom, through which, like a
silver thread, shot the twittering song of a bird, which had
inherited the gathered carelessness and bliss of a long ancestry
in God's aviary.

Godfrey came softly to the door, which he found standing ajar,
and peeped in. There stood Letty, warm and bright in the middle
of the dusky coolness. She had changed her dress since he saw
her, and now, in a pink-rosebud print, with the sleeves tucked
above her elbows, was skimming the cream in a great red-brown
earthen pan. He pushed the door a little, and, at its screech
along the uneven floor, Letty's head turned quickly on her lithe
neck, and she saw Godfrey's brown face and kind blue eyes where
she had never seen them before. In his hand glowed the book: some
of the stronger light from behind him fell on it, and it caught
her eyes.

"Letty," he said, "I have just come upon this book in my library:
would you care to have it?"

"You don't mean to keep for my own, Cousin Godfrey?" cried Letty,
in sweet, childish fashion, letting the skimmer dive like a coot
to the bottom of the milk-pool, and hastily wiping her hands in
her apron. Her face had flushed rosy with pleasure, and grew
rosier and brighter still as she took the rich morocco-bound
thing from Godfrey's hand into her own. Daintily she peeped
within the boards, and the gilding of the leaves responded in
light to her smile.

"Poetry!" she cried, in a tone of delight. "Is it really for me,
Cousin Godfrey? Do you think I shall be able to understand it?"

"You can soon settle that question for yourself," answered
Godfrey, with a pleased smile--for he augured well from this
reception of his gift--and turned to leave the dairy.

"But, Cousin Godfrey--please!" she called after him, "you don't
give me time to thank you."

"That will do when you are certain you care for it," he returned.

"I care for it very _much_!" she replied.

"How can you say that, when you don't know yet whether you will
understand it or not?" he rejoined, and closed the door.

Letty stood motionless, the book in her hand illuminating the
dusk with gold, and warming its coolness with its crimson boards
and silken linings. One poem after another she read, nor knew how
the time passed, until the voice of her aunt in her ears warned
her to finish her skimming, and carry the jug to the pantry. But
already Letty had taken a little cream off the book also, and
already, between the time she entered and the time she left the
dairy, had taken besides a fresh start in spiritual growth.

The next day Godfrey took an opportunity of asking her whether
she had found in the book anything she liked. To his
disappointment she mentioned one of the few commonplace things
the collection contained--a last-century production, dull and
respectable, which, surely, but for the glamour of some pleasant
association, the editor would never have included. Happily,
however, he bethought himself in time not to tell her the thing
was worthless: such a word, instead of chipping the shell in
which the girl's faculty lay dormant, would have smashed the
whole egg into a miserable albuminous mass. And he was well
rewarded; for, the same day, in the evening, he heard her singing
gayly over her work, and listening discovered that she was
singing verse after verse of one of the best ballads in the whole
book. She had chosen with the fancy of pleasing Godfrey; she sang
to please herself. After this discovery he set himself in earnest
to the task of developing her intellectual life, and, daily
almost, grew more interested in the endeavor. His main object was
to make her think; and for the high purpose, chiefly but not
exclusively, he employed verse.

The main obstacle to success he soon discovered to be Letty's
exceeding distrust of herself. I would not be mistaken to mean
that she had too little confidence in herself; of that no one can
have too little. Self-distrust will only retard, while self-
confidence will betray. The man ignorant in these things will
answer me, "But you must have one or the other." "You must have
neither," I reply. "You must follow the truth, and, in that
pursuit, the less one thinks about himself, the pursuer, the
better. Let him so hunger and thirst after the truth that the dim
vision of it occupies all his being, and leaves no time to think
of his hunger and his thirst. Self-forgetfulness in the reaching
out after that which is essential to us is the healthiest of
mental conditions. One has to look to his way, to his deeds, to
his conduct--not to himself. In such losing of the false, or
merely reflected, we find the true self. There is no harm in
being stupid, so long as a man does not think himself clever; no
good in being clever, if a man thinks himself so, for that is a
short way to the worst stupidity. If you think yourself clever,
set yourself to do something; then you will have a chance of
humiliation."

With good faculties, and fine instincts, Letty was always
thinking she must be wrong, just because it was she was in it--a
lovely fault, no doubt, but a fault greatly impeditive to
progress, and tormenting to a teacher. She got on very fairly in
spite of it, however; and her devotion to Godfrey, as she felt
herself growing in his sight, increased almost to a passion. Do
not misunderstand me, my reader. If I say anything grows to a
passion, I mean, of course, the passion of that thing, not of
something else. Here I no more mean that her devotion became what
in novels is commonly called love, than, if I said ambition or
avarice had grown to a passion, I should mean those vices had
changed to love. Godfrey Wardour was at least ten years older
than Letty; besides him, she had not a single male relative in
this world--neither had she mother or sister on whom to let out
her heart; while of Mrs. Wardour, who was more severe on her than
on any one else, she was not a little afraid: from these causes
it came that Cousin Godfrey grew and grew in Letty's imagination,
until he was to her everything great and good--her idea of him
naturally growing as she grew herself under his influences. To
her he was the heart of wisdom, the head of knowledge, the arm of
strength.

But her worship was quiet, as the worship of maiden, in whatever
kind, ought to be. She knew nothing of what is called love except
as a word, and from sympathy with the persons in the tales she
read. Any remotest suggestion of its existence in her relation to
Godfrey she would have resented as the most offensive
impertinence--an accusation of impossible irreverence.

By degrees Godfrey came to understand, but then only in a
measure, with what a self-refusing, impressionable nature he was
dealing; and, as he saw, he became more generous toward her, more
gentle and delicate in his ministration. Of necessity he grew
more and more interested in her, especially after he had made the
discovery that the moment she laid hold of a truth--the moment,
that is, when it was no longer another's idea but her own
perception--it began to sprout in her in all directions of
practice. By nature she was not intellectually quick; but,
because such was her character, the ratio of her progress was of
necessity an increasing one.

If Godfrey had seen in his new relation to Letty a possibility of
the revival of feelings he had supposed for ever extinguished,
such a possibility would have borne to him purely the aspect of
danger; at the mere idea of again falling in love he would have
sickened with dismay; and whether or not ho had any dread of such
a catastrophe, certain it is that he behaved to her more as a
pedagogue than a cousinly tutor, insisting on a precision in all
she did that might have gone far to rouse resentment and recoil
in the mind of a less childlike woman. Just as surely,
notwithstanding all that, however, did the sweet girl grow into
his heart: it _could_ not be otherwise. The idea of her was
making a nest for itself in his soul--what kind of a nest for
long he did not know, and for long did not think to inquire.
Living thus, like an elder brother with a much younger sister, he
was more than satisfied, refusing, it may be, to regard the
probability of intruding change. But how far any man and woman
may have been made capable of loving without falling in love, can
be answered only after question has yielded to history. In the
mean time, Mrs. Wardour, who would have been indignant at the
notion of any equal bond between her idolized son and her
patronized cousin, neither saw, nor heard, nor suspected anything
to rouse uneasiness.

Things were thus in the old house, when the growing affection of
Letty for Mary Marston took form one day in the request that she
would make Thornwick the goal of her Sunday walk. She repented,
it is true, the moment she had said the words, from dread of her
aunt; but they had been said, and were accepted. Mary went, and
the aunt difficulty had been got over. The friendship of Godfrey
also had now run into that of the girls, and Mary's visits were
continued with pleasure to all, and certainly with no little
profit to herself; for, where the higher nature can not
communicate the greater benefit, it will reap it. Her Sunday
visit became to Mary the one foraging expedition of the week--
that which going to church ought to be, and so seldom can be.

The beginning and main-stay of her spiritual life was, as we have
seen, her father, in whom she believed absolutely. From books and
sermons she had got little good; for in neither kind had the best
come nigh her. She did very nearly her best to obey, but without
much perceiving the splendor of the thing required, or much
feeling its might upon her own eternal nature. She was as yet, in
relation to the gospel, much as the Jews were in relation to
their law; they had not yet learned the gospel of their law, and
she was yet only serving the law of the gospel. But she was
making progress, in simple and pure virtue of her obedience. Show
me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest,
sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I
shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in
the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for
holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest.

And now was sent Godfrey to her aid, a teacher himself far behind
his pupil, inasmuch as he was more occupied with what he was,
than what he had to become: the weakest may be sent to give the
strongest saving help; even the foolish may mediate between the
wise and the wiser; and Godfrey presented Mary to men greater
than himself, whom in a short time she would understand even
better than he. Book after book he lent her--now and then gave
her one of the best--introducing her, with no special intention,
to much in the way of religion that was good in the way of
literature as well. Only where he delighted mainly in the
literature, she delighted more in the religion. Some of my
readers will be able to imagine what it must have been to a
capable, clear-thinking, warm-hearted, loving soul like Mary,
hitherto in absolute ignorance of any better religious poetry
than the chapel hymn-book afforded her, to make acquaintance with
George Herbert, with Henry Vaughan, with Giles Fletcher, with
Richard Crashaw, with old Mason, not to mention Milton, and
afterward our own Father Newman and Father Faber.

But it was by no means chiefly upon such that Godfrey led the
talk on the Sunday afternoons. A lover of all truly imaginative
literature, his knowledge of it was large, nor confined to that
of his own country, although that alone was at present available
for either of his pupils. His seclusion from what is called the
world had brought him into larger and closer contact with what is
really the world. The breakers upon reef and shore may be the
ocean to some, but he who would know the ocean indeed must leave
them afar, sinking into silence, and sail into wider and lonelier
spaces. Through Godfrey, Mary came to know of a land never
promised, yet open--a land of whose nature even she had never
dreamed--a land of the spirit, flowing with milk and honey--a
land of which the fashionable world knows little more than the
dwellers in the back slums, although it imagines it lying, with
the kingdoms of the earth, at its feet.

As regards her feeling toward her new friend, this opener of
unseen doors, the greatness of her obligation to him wrought
against presumption and any possible folly. Besides, Mary was one
who possessed power over her own spirit--rare gift, given to none
but those who do something toward the taking of it. She was able
in no small measure to order her own thoughts. Without any theory
of self-rule, she yet ruled her Self. She was not one to slip
about in the saddle, or let go the reins for a kick and a plunge
or two. There was the thing that should be, and the thing that
should not be; the thing that was reasonable, and the thing that
was absurd. Add to all this, that she believed she saw in Mr.
Wardour's behavior to his cousin, in the careful gentleness
evident through all the severity of the schoolmaster, the
presence of a deeper feeling, that might one day blossom to the
bliss of her friend--and we need not wonder if Mary's heart
remained calm in the very floods of its gratitude; while the
truth she gathered by aid of the intercourse, enlarging her
strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength.
She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her
gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on
its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a
good thing.

Nor was Godfrey without payment for what he did: the revival of
ancient benefits, a new spring-time of old flowers, and the fresh
quickening of one's own soul, are the spiritual wages of every
spiritual service. In giving, a man receives more than he gives,
and the _more_ is in proportion to the worth of the thing
given.

Mary did not encourage Letty to call at the shop, because the
rudeness of the Turnbulls was certain to break out on her
departure, as it did one day that Godfrey, dismounting at the
door, and entering the shop in quest of something for his mother,
naturally shook hands with Mary over the counter. No remark was
made so long as her father was in the shop, for, with all their
professed contempt of him and his ways, the Turnbulls stood
curiously in awe of him: no one could tell what he might or might
not do, seeing they did not in the least understand him; and
there were reasons for avoiding offense.

But the moment he retired, which he always did earlier than the
rest, the small-arms of the enemy began to go off, causing Mary a
burning cheek and indignant heart. Yet the great desire of Mr.
Turnbull was a match between George and Mary, for that would,
whatever might happen, secure the Marston money to the business.
Their evil report Mary did not carry to her father. She scorned
to trouble his lofty nature with her small annoyances; neither
could they long keep down the wellspring of her own peace, which,
deeper than anger could reach, soon began to rise again fresh in
her spirit, fed from that water of life which underlies all care.
In a few moments it had cooled her cheek, stilled her heart, and
washed the wounds of offense.




CHAPTER VI.

TOM HELMER.


When Tom Helmer's father died, his mother, who had never been
able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him,
lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted
under his presence until again he went. Never thereafter did
those two, mother and son, meet, whether from a separation of
months or of hours, without at once tumbling into an obstinate
difference. When the youth was at home, their sparring, to call
it by a mild name, went on from morning to night, and sometimes
almost from night to morning. Primarily, of course, the fault lay
with the mother; and things would have gone far worse, had not
the youth, along with the self-will of his mother, inherited his
father's good nature. At school he was a great favorite, and
mostly had his own way, both with boys and masters, for, although
a fool, he was a pleasant fool, clever, fond of popularity, and
complaisant with everybody--except always his mother, the merest
word from whom would at once rouse all the rebel in his blood. In
person he was tall and loosely knit, with large joints and
extremities. His face was handsome and vivacious, expressing far
more than was in him to express, and giving ground for
expectation such as he had never met. He was by no means an ill-
intentioned fellow, preferred doing well and acting fairly, and
neither at school nor at college had got into any serious scrape.
But he had never found it imperative to reach out after his own
ideal of duty. He had never been worthy the name of student, or
cared much for anything beyond the amusements the universities
provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his
only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a
vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in
the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague
intents, never by his actions; that these had little
correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him
that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well
enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not only with fluency of
speech, that crowning glory and ruin of a fool, but with
plausibility of tone and demeanor, a confidence that imposed both
on himself and on others, and a certain dropsical
impressionableness of surface which made him seem and believe
himself sympathetic, nobody could well help liking him, and it
took some time to make one accept the disappointment he caused.

He was now in his twenty-first year, at home, pretending that
nothing should make him go back to Oxford, and enjoying more than
ever the sport of plaguing his mother. A soul-doctor might have
prescribed for him a course of small-pox, to be followed by
intermittent fever, with nobody to wait upon him but Mrs. Gamp:
after that, his mother might have had a possible chance with him,
and he with his mother. But, unhappily, he had the best of
health--supreme blessing in the eyes of the fool whom it enables
to be a worse fool still; and was altogether the true son of his
mother, who consoled herself for her absolute failure in his
moral education with the reflection that she had reared him sound
in wind and limb. Plaguing his mother, amusing himself as best he
could, riding about the country on a good mare, of which he was
proud, he was living in utter idleness, affording occasion for
much wonder that he had never yet disgraced himself. He talked to
everybody who would talk to him, and made acquaintance with
anybody on the spur of the moment's whim. He would sit on a log
with a gypsy, and bamboozle him with lies made for the purpose,
then thrash him for not believing them. He called here and called
there, made himself specially agreeable everywhere, went to every
ball and evening party to which he could get admittance in the
neighborhood, and flirted with any girl who would let him. He
meant no harm, neither had done much, and was imagined by most
incapable of doing any. The strange thing to some was that he
staid on in the country, and did not go to London and run up
bills for his mother to pay; but the mare accounted for a good
deal; and the fact that almost immediately on his late return he
had seen Letty and fallen in love with her at first sight,
accounted for a good deal more. Not since then, however, had he
yet been able to meet her so as only to speak to her; for
Thornwick was one of the few houses of the middle class in the
neighborhood where he was not encouraged to show himself. He was
constantly, therefore, on the watch for a chance of seeing her,
and every Sunday went to church in that same hope and no other.
But Letty knew nothing of the favor in which she stood with him;
for, although Tom had, as we have heard, confessed to her friend
Mary Marston his admiration of her, Mary had far too much good
sense to make herself his ally in the matter.




CHAPTER VII.

DURNMELLING.


In the autumn, Mr. Mortimer of Durnmelling resolved to give a
harvest-home to his tenants, and under the protection of the
occasion to invite also a good many of his neighbors and of the
townsfolk of Testbridge, whom he could not well ask to dinner:
there happened to be a political expediency for something of the
sort: America is not the only country in which ambition opens the
door to mean doings on the part of such as count themselves
gentlemen. Not a few on whom Lady Margaret had never called, and
whom she would never in any way acknowledge again, were invited;
nor did the knowledge of what it meant cause many of them to
decline the questionable honor--which fact carried in it the best
justification of which the meanness and insult were capable. Mrs.
Wardour accepted for herself and Letty; but in their case Lady
Margaret did call, and in person give the invitation. Godfrey
positively refused to accompany them. He would not be patronized,
he said; "--and by an inferior," he added to himself.

Mr. Mortimer was the illiterate son of a literary father who had
reaped both money and fame. The son spent the former, on the
strength of the latter married an earl's daughter, and thereupon
began to embody in his own behavior his ideas of how a nobleman
ought to carry himself; whence, from being only a small, he
became an objectionable man, and failed of being amusing by
making himself offensive. He had never manifested the least
approach to neighborliness with Godfrey, although their houses
were almost within a stone's throw of each other. Had Wardour
been an ordinary farmer, of whose presuming on the acquaintance
there could have been no danger, Mortimer would doubtless have
behaved differently; but as Wardour had some pretensions--namely,
old family, a small, though indeed _very_ small, property of
his own, a university education, good horses, and the habits and
manners of a gentleman--the men scarcely even saluted when they
met. The Mortimer ladies, indeed, had more than once remarked--
but it was in solemn silence, each to herself only--how well the
man sat, and how easily he handled the hunter he always rode; but
not once until now had so much as a greeting passed between them
and Mrs. Wardour. It was not therefore wonderful that Godfrey
should not choose to accept their invitation. Finding, however,
that his mother was distressed at having to go to the gathering
without him, and far more exercised in her mind than was needful
as to what would be thought of his absence, and what excuse it
would be becoming to make, he resolved to go to London a day or
two before the event, and pay a long-promised visit to a clerical
friend.

The relative situation of the houses--I mean the stone-and-lime
houses--of Durnmelling and Thornwick, was curious; and that they
had at one time formed part of the same property might have
suggested itself to any beholder. Durnmelling was built by an
ancestor of Godfrey's, who, forsaking the old nest for the new,
had allowed Thornwick to sink into a mere farmhouse, in which
condition it had afterward become the sole shelter of the
withered fortunes of the Wardours. In the hands of Godfrey's
father, by a continuity of judicious cares, and a succession of
partial resurrections, it had been restored to something like its
original modest dignity. Durnmelling, too, had in part sunk into
ruin, and had been but partially recovered from it; still, it
swelled important beside its antecedent Thornwick. Nothing but a
deep ha-ha separated the two houses, of which the older and
smaller occupied the higher ground. Between it and the ha-ha was
nothing but grass--in front of the house fine enough and well
enough kept to be called lawn, had not Godfrey's pride refused
the word. On the lower, the Durnmelling side of the fence, were
trees, shrubbery, and out-houses--the chimney of one of which,
the laundry, gave great offense to Mrs. Wardour, when, as she
said, wind and wash came together. But, although they stood so
near, there was no lawful means of communication between the
houses except the road; and the mile that implied was seldom
indeed passed by any of the unneighborly neighbors.

The father of Lady Margaret would at one time have purchased
Thornwick at twice its value; but the present owner could not
have bought it at half its worth. He had of late been losing
money heavily--whence, in part, arose that anxiety of Lady
Margaret's not to keep Mr. Redmain fretting for his lunch.

The house of Durnmelling, new compared with that of Thornwick,
was yet, as I have indicated, old enough to have passed also
through vicissitudes, and a large portion of the original
structure had for many years been nothing better than a ruin.
Only a portion of one side of its huge square was occupied by the
family, and the rest of that side was not habitable. Lady
Margaret, of an ancient stock, had gathered from it only pride,
not reverence; therefore, while she valued the old, she neglected
it; and what money she and her husband at one time spent upon the
house, was devoted to addition and ornamentation, nowise to
preservation or restoration. They had enlarged both dining-room
and drawing-rooms to twice their former size, when half the
expense, with a few trees from a certain outlying oak-plantation
of their own, would have given them a room fit for a regal
assembly. For, constituting a portion of the same front in which
they lived, lay roofless, open to every wind that blew, its paved
floor now and then in winter covered with snow--an ancient hall,
whose massy south wall was pierced by three lovely windows,
narrow and lofty, with simple, gracious tracery in their pointed
heads. This hall connected the habitable portion of the house
with another part, less ruinous than itself, but containing only
a few rooms in occasional use for household purposes, or, upon
necessity, for quite inferior lodgment. It was a glorious ruin,
of nearly a hundred feet in length, and about half that in width,
the walls entire, and broad enough to walk round upon in safety.
Their top was accessible from a tower, which formed part of the
less ruinous portion, and contained the stair and some small
rooms.

Once, the hall was fair with portraits and armor and arms, with
fire and lights, and state and merriment; now the sculptured
chimney lay open to the weather, and the sweeping winds had made
its smooth hearthstone clean as if fire had never been there. Its
floor was covered with large flags, a little broken: these, in
prospect of the coming entertainment, a few workmen were
leveling, patching, replacing. For the tables were to be set
here, and here there was to be dancing after the meal.

It was Miss Yolland's idea, and to her was committed the
responsibility of its preparation and adornment for the occasion,
in which Hesper gave her active assistance. With colored
blankets, with carpets, with a few pieces of old tapestry, and a
quantity of old curtains, mostly of chintz, excellent in hues and
design, all cunningly arranged for as much of harmony as could be
had, they contrived to clothe the walls to the height of six or
eight feet, and so gave the weather-beaten skeleton an air of
hospitable preparation and respectful reception.

The day and the hour arrived. It was a hot autumnal afternoon.
Borne in all sorts of vehicles, from a carriage and pair to a
taxed cart, the guests kept coming. As they came, they mostly
scattered about the place. Some loitered on the lawn by the
flower-beds and the fountain; some visited the stables and the
home-farm, with its cow-houses and dairy and piggeries; some the
neglected greenhouses, and some the equally neglected old-
fashioned alleys, with their clipped yews and their moss-grown
statues. No one belonging to the house was anywhere visible to
receive them, until the great bell at length summoned them to the
plentiful meal spread in the ruined hall. "The hospitality of
some people has no roof to it," Godfrey said, when he heard of
the preparations. "Ten people will give you a dinner, for one who
will offer you a bed and a breakfast:"

Then at last their host made his appearance, and took the head of
the table: the ladies, he said, were to have the honor of joining
the company afterward. They were at the time--but this he did not
say--giving another stratum of society a less ponderous, but yet
tolerably substantial, refreshment in the dining-room.

By the time the eating and drinking were nearly over, the shades
of evening had gathered; but even then some few of the farmers,
capable only of drinking, grumbled at having their potations
interrupted for the dancers. These were presently joined by the
company from the house, and the great hall was crowded.

Much to her chagrin, Mrs. Wardour had a severe headache,
occasioned by her working half the night at her dress, and was
compelled to remain at home. But she allowed Letty to go without
her, which she would not have done had she not been so anxious to
have news of what she could not lift her head to see: she sent
her with an old servant--herself one of the invited guests--to
gather and report. The dancing had begun before they reached the
hall.

Tom Helmer had arrived among the first, and had joined the
tenants in their feast, faring well, and making friends, such as
he knew how to make, with everybody in his vicinity. When the
tables were removed, and the rest of the company began to come
in, he went about searching anxiously for Letty's sweet face, but
it did not appear; and, when she did arrive, she stole in without
his seeing her, and stood mingled with the crowd about the door.

It was a pleasant sight that met her eyes. The wide space was
gayly illuminated with colored lamps, disposed on every shelf,
and in every crevice of the walls, some of them gleaming like
glow-worms out of mere holes; while candles in sconces, and lamps
on the window-sills and wherever they could stand, gave a light
the more pleasing that it was not brilliant. Overhead, the night-
sky was spangled with clear pulsing stars, afloat in a limpid
blue, vast even to awfulness in the eyes of such--were any such
there?--as say to themselves that to those worlds also were they
born. Outside, it was dark, save where the light streamed from
the great windows far into the night. The moon was not yet up;
she would rise in good time to see the scattering guests to their
homes.

Tom's heart had been sinking, for he could see Letty nowhere. Now
at last, he had been saying to himself all the day, had come his
chance! and his chance seemed but to mock him. More than any girl
he had ever seen, had Letty moved him--perhaps because she was
more unlike his mother. He knew nothing, it is true, or next to
nothing, of her nature; but that was of little consequence to one
who knew nothing, and never troubled himself to know anything, of
his own. Was he doomed never to come near his idol?--Ah, there
she was! Yes; it was she--all but lost in a humble group near the
door! His foolish heart--not foolish in that--gave a great bound,
as if it would leap to her where she stood. She was dressed in
white muslin, from which her white throat rose warm and soft. Her
head was bent forward, and a gentle dissolved smile was over all
her face, as with loveliest eyes she watched eagerly the motions
of the dance, and her ears drank in the music of the yeomanry
band. He seized the first opportunity of getting nearer to her.
He had scarcely spoken to her before, but that did not trouble
Tom. Even in a more ceremonious assembly, that would never have
abashed him; and here there was little form, and much freedom. He
had, besides, confidence in his own carriage and manners--which,
indeed, were those of a gentleman--and knew himself not likely to
repel by his approach.

Mr. Mortimer had opened the dancing by leading out the wife of
his principal tenant, a handsome matron, whose behavior and
expression were such as to give a safe, home-like feeling to the
shy and doubtful of the company. But Tom knew better than injure
his chance by precipitation: he would wait until the dancing was
more general, and the impulse to movement stronger, and then
offer himself. He stood therefore near Letty for some little
time, talking to everybody, and making himself agreeable, as was
his wont, all round; then at last, as if he had just caught sight
of her, walked up to her where she stood flushed and eager, and
asked her to favor him with her hand in the next dance.

By this time Letty had got familiar with his presence, had
recalled her former meeting with him, had heard his name spoken
by not a few who evidently liked him, and was quite pleased when
he asked her to dance with him.

In the dance, nothing but commonplaces passed between them; but
Tom had a certain pleasant way of his own in saying the
commonest, emptiest things--an off-hand, glancing, skimming,
swallow-like way of brushing and leaving a thing, as if he "could
an' if he would," which made it seem for the moment as if he had
said something: were his companion capable of discovering the
illusion, there was no time; Tom was instantly away, carrying him
or her with him to something else. But there was better than
this--there was poetry, more than one element of it, in Tom. In
the presence of a girl that pleased him, there would rise in him
a poetic atmosphere, full of a rainbow kind of glamour, which,
first possessing himself, passed out from him and called up a
similar atmosphere, a similar glamour, about many of the girls he
talked to. This he could no more help than the grass can help
smelling sweet after the rain.

Tom was a finely projected, well-built, unfinished, barely
furnished house, with its great central room empty, where the
devil, coming and going at his pleasure, had not yet begun to
make any great racket. There might be endless embryonic evil in
him, but Letty was aware of no repellent atmosphere about him,
and did not shrink from his advances. He pleased her, and why
should she not be pleased with him? Was it a fault to be easily
pleased? The truer and sweeter any human self, the readier is it
to be pleased with another self--save, indeed, something in it
grate on the moral sense: that jars through the whole harmonious
hypostasy. To Tom, therefore, Letty responded with smiles and
pleasant words, even grateful to such a fine youth for taking
notice of her small self.

The sun had set in a bank of cloud, which, as if he had been a
lump of leaven to it, immediately began to swell and rise, and
now hung dark and thick over the still, warm night. Even the
farmers were unobservant of the change: their crops were all in,
they had eaten and drunk heartily, and were merry, looking on or
sharing in the multiform movement, their eyes filled with light
and color.

Suddenly came a torrent-sound in the air, heard of few and heeded
by none, and straight into the hall rushed upon the gay company a
deluge of rain, mingled with large, half-melted hail-stones. In a
moment or two scarce a light was left burning, except those in
the holes and recesses of the walls. The merrymakers scattered
like flies--into the house, into the tower, into the sheds and
stables in the court behind, under the trees in front--anywhere
out of the hall, where shelter was none from the perpendicular,
abandoned down-pour.

At that moment, Letty was dancing with Tom, and her hand happened
to be in his. He clasped it tight, and, as quickly as the crowd
and the confusion of shelter-seeking would permit, led her to the
door of the tower already mentioned. But many had run in the same
direction, and already its lower story and stair were crowded
with refugees--the elder bemoaning the sudden change, and folding
tight around them what poor wraps they were fortunate enough to
have retained; the younger merrier than ever, notwithstanding the
cold gusts that now poked their spirit-arms higher and thither
through the openings of the half-ruinous building: to them even
the destruction of their finery was but added cause of laughter.
But a few minutes before, its freshness had been a keen pleasure
to them, brightening their consciousness with a rare feeling of
perfection; now crushed and rumpled, soiled and wet and torn, it
was still fuel to the fire of gayety. But Tom did not stay among
them. He knew the place well; having a turn for scrambling, he
had been all over it many a time. On through the crowd, he led
Letty up the stair to the first floor. Even here were a few
couples talking and laughing in the dark. With a warning, by no
means unnecessary, to mind where they stepped, for the floors
were bad, he passed on to the next stair.

"Let us stop here, Mr. Helmer," said Letty. "There is plenty of
room here."

"I want to show you something," answered Tom. "You need not be
frightened. I know every nook of the place."

"I am not frightened," said Letty, and made no further objection.

At the top of that stair they entered a straight passage, in the
middle of which was a faint glimmer of light from an oval
aperture in the side of it. Thither Tom led Letty, and told her
to look through. She did so.

Beneath lay the great gulf, wide and deep, of the hall they had
just left. This was the little window, high in its gable, through
which, in far-away times, the lord or lady of the mansion could
oversee at will whatever went on below.

The rain had ceased as suddenly as it came on, and already lights
were moving about in the darkness of the abyss--one, and another,
and another, was searching for something lost in the hurry of the
scattering. It was a waste and dismal show. Neither of them had
read Dante; but Letty may have thought of the hall of Belshazzar,
the night after the hand-haunted revel, when the Medes had had
their will; for she had but lately read the story. A strange fear
came upon her, and she drew back with a shudder.

"Are you cold?" said Tom. "Of course you must be, with nothing
but that thin muslin! Shall I run down and get you a shawl?"

"Oh, no! do not leave me, please. It's not that," answered Letty.
"I don't mind the wind a bit; it's rather pleasant. It's only
that the look of the place makes me miserable, I think. It looks
as if no one had danced there for a hundred years."

"Neither any one has, I suppose, till to-night," said Tom. "What
a fine place it would be if only it had a roof to it! I can't
think how any one can live beside it and leave it like that!"

But Tom lived a good deal closer to a worse ruin, and never spent
a thought on it.

Letty shivered again.

"I'm quite ashamed of myself," she said, trying to speak
cheerfully. "I can't think why I should feel like this--just as
if something dreadful were watching me! I'll go home, Mr.
Helmer.".

"It will be much the safest thing to do: I fear you have indeed
caught cold," replied Tom, rejoiced at the chance of accompanying
her. "I shall be delighted to see you safe."

"There is not the least occasion for that, thank you," answered
Letty. "I have an old servant of my aunt's with me--somewhere
about the place. The storm is quite over now: I will go and find
her."

Tom made no objection, but helped her down the dark stair,
hoping, however, the servant might not be found.

As they went, Letty seemed to herself to be walking in some old
dream of change and desertion. The tower was empty as a monument,
not a trace of the crowd left, which a few minutes before had
thronged it. The wind had risen in earnest now, and was rushing
about, like a cold wild ghost, through every cranny of the
desolate place. Had Letty, when she reached the bottom of the
stairs, found herself on the rocks of the seashore, with the
waves dashing up against them, she would only have said to
herself, "I knew I was in a dream!" But the wind having blown
away the hail-cloud, the stars were again shining down into the
hall. One or two forlorn-looking searchers were still there; the
rest had scattered like the gnats. A few were already at home;
some were harnessing their horses to go, nor would wait for the
man in the moon to light his lantern; some were already trudging
on foot through the dark. Hesper and Miss Yolland were talking to
two or three friends in the drawing-room; Lady Margaret was in
her boudoir, and Mr. Mortimer smoking a cigar in his study.

Nowhere could Letty find Susan. She was in the farmer's kitchen
behind. Tom suspected as much, but was far from hinting the
possibility. Letty found her cloak, which she had left in the
hall, soaked with rain, and thought it prudent to go home at
once, nor prosecute her search for Susan further. She accepted,
therefore, Tom's renewed offer of his company.

They were just leaving the hall, when a thought came to Letty:
the moon suddenly appearing above the horizon had put it in her
head.

"Oh," she cried, "I know quite a short way home!" and, without
waiting any response from her companion, she turned, and led him
in an opposite direction, round, namely, by the back of the
court, into a field. There she made for a huge oak, which gloomed
in the moonlight by the sunk fence parting the grounds. In the
slow strength of its growth, by the rounding of its bole, and the
spreading of its roots, it had so rent and crumbled the wall as
to make through it a little ravine, leading to the top of the ha-
ha. When they reached it, before even Tom saw it, Letty turned
from him, and was up in a moment. At the top she turned to bid
him good night, but there he was, close behind her, insisting on
seeing her safe to the house.

"Is this the way you always come?" asked Tom.

"I never was on Durnmelling land before," answered Letty.

"How did you find the short-cut, then?" he asked. "It certainly
does not look as if it were much used."

"Of course not," replied Letty. "There is no communication
between Durnmelling and Thornwick now. It was all ours once,
though, Cousin Godfrey says. Did you notice how the great oak
sends its biggest arm over our field?"

"Yes."

"Well, I often sit there under it, when I want to learn my
lesson, and can't rest in the house; and that's how I know of the
crack in the ha-ha."

She said it in absolute innocence, but Tom laid it up in his
mind.

"Are you at lessons still?" he said. "Have you a governess?"

"No," she answered, in a tone of amusement. "But Cousin Godfrey
teaches me many things."

This made Tom thoughtful; and little more had been said, when
they reached the gate of the yard behind the house, and she would
not let him go a step farther.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE OAK.


In the morning, as she narrated the events of the evening, she
told her aunt of the acquaintance she had made, and that he had
seen her home. This information did not please the old lady, as,
indeed, without knowing any reason, Letty had expected. Mrs.
Wardour knew all about Tom's mother, or thought she did, and knew
little good; she knew also that, although her son was a general
favorite, her own son had a very poor opinion of him. On these
grounds, and without a thought of injustice to Letty, she sharply
rebuked the poor girl for allowing such a fellow to pay her any
attention, and declared that, if ever she permitted him so much
as to speak to her again, she would do something which she left
in a cloud of vaguest suggestion.

Letty made no reply. She was hurt. Nor was it any wonder if she
judged this judgment of Tom by the injustice of the judge to
herself. It was of no consequence to her, she said to herself,
whether she spoke to him again or not; but had any one the right
to compel another to behave rudely? Only what did it matter,
since there was so little chance of her ever seeing him again!
All day she felt weary and disappointed, and, after the
merrymaking of the night before, the household work was irksome.
But she would soon have got over both weariness and tedium had
her aunt been kind. It is true, she did not again refer to Tom,
taking it for granted that he was done with; but all day she kept
driving Letty from one thing to another, nor was once satisfied
with anything she did, called her even an ungrateful girl, and,
before evening, had rendered her more tired, mortified, and
dispirited, than she had ever been in her life.

But the tormentor was no demon; she was only doing what all of us
have often done, and ought to be heartily ashamed of: she was
only emptying her fountain of bitter water. Oppressed with the
dregs of her headache, wretched because of her son's absence, who
had not been a night from home for years, annoyed that she had
spent time and money in preparation for nothing, she had allowed
the said cistern to fill to overflowing, and upon Letty it
overflowed like a small deluge. Like some of the rest of us, she
never reflected how balefully her evil mood might operate; and
that all things work for good in the end, will not cover those by
whom come the offenses. Another night's rest, it is true, sent
the evil mood to sleep again for a time, but did not exorcise it;
for there are demons that go not out without prayer, and a bad
temper is one of them--a demon as contemptible, mean-spirited,
and unjust, as any in the peerage of hell--much petted,
nevertheless, and excused, by us poor lunatics who are possessed
by him. Mrs. Wardour was a lady, as the ladies of this world go,
but a poor lady for the kingdom of heaven: I should wonder much
if she ranked as more than a very common woman there.

The next day all was quiet; and a visit paid Mrs. Wardour by a
favorite sister whom she had not seen for months, set Letty at
such liberty as she seldom had. In the afternoon she took the
book Godfrey had given her, in which he had set her one of
Milton's smaller poems to study, and sought the shadow of the
Durnmelling oak.

It was a lovely autumn day, the sun glorious as ever in the
memory of Abraham, or the author of Job, or the builder of the
scaled pyramid at Sakkara. But there was a keenness in the air
notwithstanding, which made Letty feel a little sad without
knowing why, as she seated herself to the task Cousin Godfrey had
set her. She, as well as his mother, heartily wished he were
home. She was afraid of him, it is true; but in how different a
way from that in which she was afraid of his mother! His absence
did not make her feel free, and to escape from his mother was
sometimes the whole desire of her day.

She was trying hard, not altogether successfully, to fix her
attention on her task, when a yellow leaf dropped on the very
line she was poring over. Thinking how soon the trees would be
bare once more, she brushed the leaf away, and resumed her
lesson.

   "To fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light,"

she had just read once more, when down fell a second tree-leaf on
the book-leaf. Again she brushed it away, and read to the end of
the sonnet:

"Hast gained thy entrance, virgin wise and pure."

What Letty's thoughts about the sonnet were, I can not tell: how
fix thought indefinite in words defined? But her angel might well
have thought what a weary road she had to walk before she gained
that entrance. But for all of us the road _has_ to be
walked, every step, and the uttermost farthing paid. The gate
will open wide to welcome us, but it will not come to meet us.
Neither is it any use to turn aside; it only makes the road
longer and harder.

Down on the same spot fell the third leaf. Letty looked up. There
was a man in the tree over her head. She started to her feet. At
the same moment, he dropped on the ground beside her, lifting his
hat as coolly as if he had met her on the road. Her heart seemed
to stand still with fright. She stood silent, with white lips
parted.

"I hope I haven't frightened you," said Tom. "Do forgive me," he
added, becoming more aware of the perturbation he had caused her.
"You were so kind to me the other night, I could not help wanting
to see you again. I had no idea the sight of me would terrify you
so."

"You gave me such a start!" gasped Letty, with her hand pressed
on her heart.

"I was afraid of it," answered Tom; "but what could I do? I was
certain, if you saw me coming, you would run away."

"Why should you think that?" asked Letty, a faint color rising in
her cheek.

"Because," answered Tom, "I was sure they would be telling you
all manner of things against me. But there is no harm in me--
really, Miss Lovel--nothing, that is, worth mentioning."

"I am sure there isn't," said Letty; and then there was a pause.

"What book are you reading, may I ask?" said Tom.

Letty had now remembered her aunt's injunctions and threats; but,
partly from a kind of paralysis caused by his coolness, partly
from its being impossible to her nature to be curt with any one
with whom she was not angry, partly from mere lack of presence of
mind, not knowing what to do, yet feeling she ought to run to the
house, what should she do but drop down again on the very spot
whence she had been scared! Instantly Tom threw himself on the
grass at her feet, and there lay, looking up at her with eyes of
humble admiration.

Confused and troubled, she began to turn over the leaves of her
book. She supposed afterward she must have asked him why he
stared at her so, for the next thing she remembered was hearing
him say:

"I can't help it. You are so lovely!"

"Please don't talk such nonsense to me," she rejoined. "I am not
lovely, and I know it. What is not true can not please anybody."

She spoke a little angrily now.

"I speak the truth," said Tom, quietly and earnestly. "Why should
you think I do not?"

"Because nobody ever said so before."

"Then it is quite time somebody should say so," returned Tom,
changing his tone. "It may be a painful fact, but even ladies
ought to be told the truth, and learn to bear it. To say you are
not lovely would be a downright lie."

"I wish you wouldn't talk to me about myself!" said Letty,
feeling confused and improper, but not altogether displeased that
it was possible for such a mistake to be made. "I don't want to
hear about myself. It makes me so uncomfortable! I am sure it
isn't right: is it, now, Mr. Helmer?"

As she ended, the tears rose in her eyes, partly from unanalyzed
uneasiness at the position in which she found herself and the
turn the talk had taken, partly from the discomfort of conscious
disobedience. But still she did not move.

"I am very sorry if I have vexed you," said Tom, seeing her
evident trouble. "I can't think how I've done it. I know I didn't
mean to; and I promise you not to say a word of the kind again--
if I can help it. But tell me, Letty," he went on again, changing
in tone and look and manner, and calling her by her name with
such simplicity that she never even noticed it, "do tell me what
you are reading, and that will keep me from _talking_ about
you--not from--the other thing, you know."

"There!" said Letty, almost crossly, handing him her book, and
pointing to the sonnet, as she rose to go.

Tom took the book, and sprang to his feet. He had never read the
poem, for Milton had not been one of his masters. He stood
devouring it. He was doing his best to lay hold of it quickly,
for there Letty stood, with her hand held out to take the book
again, ready upon its restoration to go at once. Silent and
motionless, to all appearance unhasting, he read and reread.
Letty was restless, and growing quite impatient; but still Tom
read, a smile slow-spreading from his eyes over his face; he was
taking possession of the poem, he would have said. But the shades
and kinds and degrees of possession are innumerable; and not
until we downright love a thing, can we _know_ we understand
it, or rightly call it our own; Tom only admired this one; it was
all he was capable of in regard to such at present. Had the whim
for acquainting himself with it seized him in his own study, he
would have satisfied it with a far more superficial interview;
but the presence of the girl, with those eyes fixed on him as he
read--his mind's eye saw them--was for the moment an enlargement
of his being, whose phase to himself was a consciousness of
ignorance.

"It is a beautiful poem," he said at last, quite honestly; and,
raising his eyes, he looked straight in hers. There is hardly a
limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of
the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A
man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel,
and yet be a very bad fool.

"I am sure it must be a beautiful poem," said Letty; "but I have
hardly got a hold of it yet." And she stretched her hand a little
farther, as if to proceed with its appropriation.

But Tom was not yet prepared to part with the book. He proceeded
instead, in fluent speech and not inappropriate language, to set
forth, not the power of the poem--that he both took and left as a
matter of course--but the beauty of those phrases, and the turns
of those expressions, which particularly pleased him--nor failing
to remark that, according to the strict laws of English verse,
there was in it one bad rhyme.

That point Letty begged him to explain, thus leading Tom to an
exposition of the laws of rhyme, in which, as far as English was
concerned, he happened to be something of an expert, partly from
an early habit of scribbling in ladies' albums. About these
surface affairs, Godfrey, understanding them better and valuing
them more than Tom, had yet taught Letty nothing, judging it
premature to teach polishing before carving; and hence this
little display of knowledge on the part of Tom impressed Letty
more than was adequate--so much, indeed, that she began to regard
him as a sage, and a compeer of her cousin Godfrey. Question
followed question, and answer followed answer, Letty feeling all
the time she _must_ go, yet standing and standing, like one
in a dream, who thinks he can not, and certainly does not break
its spell--for in the act only is the ability and the deed born.
Besides, was she to go away and leave her beautiful book in his
hand? What would Godfrey think if she did? Again and again she
stretched out her own to take it, but, although he saw the
motion, he held on to the book as to his best anchor, hurriedly
turned its leaves by fits and searching for something more to his
mind than anything of Milton's. Suddenly his face brightened.

"Ah!" he said--and remained a moment silent, reading. "I don't
wonder," he resumed, "at your admiration of Milton. He's very
grand, of course, and very musical, too; but one can't be
listening to an organ always. Not that I prefer merry music; that
must be inferior, for the tone of all the beauty in the world is
sad." Much Tom Helmer knew of beauty or sadness either! but
ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue. "But
there is the violin, now!--that can be as sad as any organ,
without being so ponderous. Hear this, now! This is the violin
after the organ--played as only a master can!"

With this preamble, he read a song of Shelley's, and read it
well, for he had a good ear for rhythm and cadence, and prided
himself on his reading of poetry.

Now the path to Letty's heart through her intellect was neither
open nor well trodden; but the song in question was a winged one,
and flew straight thither; there was something in the tone of it
that suited the pitch of her spirit-chamber. And, if Letty's
heart was not easily found, it was the readier to confess itself
when found. Her eyes filled with tears, and through those tears
Tom looked large and injured. "He must be a poet himself to read
poetry like that!" she said to herself, and felt thoroughly
assured that her aunt had wronged him greatly. "Some people scorn
poetry like sin," she said again. "I used myself to think it was
only for children, until Cousin Godfrey taught me differently."

As thus her thoughts went on interweaving themselves with the
music, all at once the song came to an end. Tom closed the book,
handed it to her, said, "Good morning, Miss Lovel," and ran down
the rent in the ha-ha; and, before Letty could come to herself,
she heard the soft thunder of hoofs on the grass. She ran to the
edge, and, looking over, saw Tom on his bay mare, at full gallop
across the field. She watched him as he neared the hedge and
ditch that bounded it, saw him go flying over, and lost sight of
him behind a hazel-copse. Slowly, then, she turned, and slowly
she went back to the house and up to her room, vaguely aware that
a wind had begun to blow in her atmosphere, although only the
sound of it had yet reached her.




CHAPTER IX.

CONFUSION.


Then first, and from that moment, Letty's troubles began. Up to
this point neither she herself nor another could array troublous
accusation or uneasy thought against her; and now she began to
feel like a very target, which exists but to receive the piercing
of arrows. At first sight, and if we do not look a long way ahead
of what people stupidly regard as the end when it is only an
horizon, it seems hard that so much we call evil, and so much
that is evil, should result from that unavoidable, blameless,
foreordained, preconstituted, and essential attraction which is
the law of nature, that is the will of God, between man and
woman. Even if Letty had fallen in love with Tom at first sight,
who dares have the assurance to blame her? who will dare to say
that Tom was blameworthy in seeking the society and friendship,
even the love, of a woman whom in all sincerity he admired, or
for using his wits to get into her presence, and detain her a
little in his company? Reasons there are, infinitely deeper than
any philosopher has yet fathomed, or is likely to fathom, why a
youth such as he--foolish, indeed, but not foolish in this--and a
sweet and blameless girl such as Letty, should exchange regards
of admiration and wonder. That which thus moves them, and goes on
to draw them closer and closer, comes with them from the very
source of their being, and is as reverend as it is lovely, rooted
in all the gentle potencies and sweet glories of creation, and
not unworthily watered with all the tears of agony and ecstasy
shed by lovers since the creation of the world. What it is, I can
not tell; I only know it is _not_ that which the young fool
calls it, still less that which the old sinner thinks it. As to
Letty's disobedience of her aunt's extravagant orders concerning
Tom, I must leave that to the judgment of the just, reminding
them that she was taken by surprise, and that, besides, it was
next to impossible to obey them. But Letty found herself very
uncomfortable, because there now was that to be known of her, the
knowledge of which would highly displease her aunt--for which
very reason, if for no other, ought she not to tell her all? On
the other hand, when she recalled how unkindly, how unjustly her
aunt had spoken, when she confessed her new acquaintance, it
became to her a question whether in very deed she _must_
tell her all that had passed that afternoon. There was no
smallest hope of any recognition of the act, surely more hard
than incumbent, but severity and unreason; _must_ she let
the thing out of her hands, and yield herself a helpless prey--
and that for good to none? Concerning Mrs. Wardour, she reasoned
justly: she who is even once unjust can not complain if the like
is expected of her again.

But, supposing it remained Letty's duty to acquaint her aunt with
what had taken place, and not forgetting that, as one of the old
people, I have to render account of the young that come after me,
and must be careful over their lovely dignities and fair duties,
I yet make haste to assert that the old people, who make it hard
for the young people to do right, may be twice as much to blame
as those whom they arraign for a concealment whose very heart is
the dread of their known selfishness, fierceness, and injustice.
If children have to obey their parents or guardians, those
parents and guardians are over them in the name of God, and they
must look to it: if in the name of God they act the devil, that
will not prove a light thing for their answer. The causing of the
little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the
causer. It were a hard, as well as a needless task, seeing there
is One who judges, to set forth how far the child is to blame as
toward the parent, where the parent first of all is utterly
wrong, yea out of true relation, toward the child. Not,
therefore, is the child free; obligation remains--modified, it
may be, but how difficult, alas, to fulfill! And, whether Letty
and such as act like her are _excusable_ or not in keeping
attentions paid them a secret, this sorrow for the good ones of
them certainly remains, that, next to a crime, a secret is the
heaviest as well as the most awkward of burdens to carry. It has
to be carried always, and all about. From morning to night it
hurts in tenderest parts, and from night to morning hurts
everywhere. At any expense, let there be openness. Take courage,
my child, and speak out. Dare to speak, I say, and that will give
you strength to resist, should disobedience become a duty.
Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can
not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not
much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of
the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as
of a man. Had she spoken, she might have heard true things of
Tom, sufficient so to alter her opinion of him as, at this early
stage of their intercourse, to alter the _set_ of her
feelings, which now was straight for him. It may be such an
exercise of courage would have rendered the troubles that were
now to follow unnecessary to her development. For lack of it, she
went about from that time with the haunting consciousness that
she was one who might be found out; that she was guilty of what
would go a good way to justify the hard words she had so
resented. Already the secret had begun to work conscious woe. She
contrived, however, to quiet herself a little with the idea,
rather than the resolve, that, as soon as Godfrey came home, she
would tell him all, confessing, too, that she had not the courage
to tell his mother. She was sure, she said to herself, he would
forgive her, would set her at peace with herself, and be unfair
neither to Mr. Helmer nor to her. In the mean time she would take
care--and this was a real resolve, not a mere act contemplated in
the future--not to go where she might meet him again. Nor was the
resolve the less genuine that, with the very making of it, rose
the memory of that delightful hour more enticing than ever. How
beautifully, and with what feeling, he read the lovely song! With
what appreciation had he not expounded Milton's beautiful poem!
Not yet was she capable of bethinking herself that it was but on
this phrase and on that he had dwelt, on this and on that line
and rhythm, enforcing their loveliness of sound and shape; while
the poem, the really important thing, the drift of the whole--it
was her own heart and conscience that revealed that to her, not
the exposition of one who at best could understand it only with
his brain. She kept to her resolve, nevertheless; and, although
Tom, leaving his horse now here now there, to avoid attracting
attention, almost every day visited the oak, he looked in vain
for the light of her approach. Disappointment increased his
longing: what would he not have given to see once more one of
those exquisite smiles break out in its perfect blossom! He kept
going and going--haunted the oak, sure of some blessed chance at
last. It was the first time in his life he had followed one idea
for a whole fortnight.

At length Godfrey came. But, although all the time he was away
Letty had retained and contemplated with tolerable calmness the
idea of making her confession to him, the moment she saw him she
felt such confession impossible. It was a sad discovery to her.
Hitherto Godfrey, and especially of late, had been the chief
source of the peace and interest of her life, that portion of her
life, namely, to which all the rest of it looked as its sky, its
overhanging betterness--and now she felt before him like a
culprit: she had done what he might be displeased with. Nay,
would that were all! for she felt like a hypocrite: she had done
that which she could not confess. Again and again, while Godfrey
was away, she had flattered herself that the help the
objectionable Tom had given her with her task would at once
recommend him to Godfrey's favorable regard; but now that she
looked in Godfrey's face, she was aware--she did not know why,
but she was aware it would not be so. Besides, she plainly saw
that the same fact would, almost of necessity, lead him to
imagine there had been much more between them than was the case;
and she argued with herself, that, now there was nothing, now
that everything was over, it would be a pity if, because of what
she could not help, and what would never be again, there should
arise anything, however small, of a misunderstanding between her
cousin Godfrey and her.

The moment Godfrey saw her, he knew that something was the
matter; but there had been that going on in him which put him on
a false track for the explanation. Scarcely had he, on his
departure for London, turned his back on Thornwick, ere he found
he was leaving one whom yet he could not leave behind him. Every
hour of his absence he found his thoughts with the sweet face and
ministering hands of his humble pupil. Therewith, however, it was
nowise revealed to him that he was in love with her. He thought
of her only as his younger sister, loving, clinging, obedient. So
dear was she to him, he thought, that he would rejoice to secure
her happiness at any cost to himself. _Any_ cost? he asked--
and reflected. Yes, he answered himself--even the cost of giving
her to a better man. The thing was sure to come, he thought--nor
thought without a keen pang, scarcely eased by the dignity of the
self-denial that would yield her with a smile. But such a crisis
was far away, and there was no necessity for now contemplating
it. Indeed, there was no _certainty_ it would ever arrive;
it was only a possibility. The child was not beautiful, although
to him she was lovely, and, being also penniless, was therefore
not likely to attract attention; while, if her being unfolded
under the genial influences he was doing his best to make
powerful upon her, if she grew aware that by them her life was
enlarging and being tenfold enriched, it was possible she might
not be ready to fall in love, and leave Thornwick. He must be
careful, however, he said to himself, quite plainly now, that his
behavior should lead her into no error. He was not afraid she
might fall in love with him; he was not so full of himself as
that; but he recoiled from the idea, as from a humiliation, that
she might imagine him in love with her. It was not merely that he
had loved once for all, and, once deceived and forsaken, would
love no more; but it was not for him, a man of thirty years, to
bow beneath the yoke of a girl of eighteen--a child in everything
except outward growth. Not for a moment would he be imagined by
her a courtier for her favor.

Thus, even in the heart of one so far above ordinary men as
Godfrey, and that in respect of the sweetest of child-maidens,
pride had its evil place; and no good ever comes of pride, for it
is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of
it thinks it grand. For its sake this wise man was firmly
resolved on caution; and so, when at last they met, it was no
more with that _abandon_ of simple pleasure with which he
had been wont to receive her when she came knocking at the door
of his study, bearing clear question or formless perplexity; and
his restraint would of itself have been enough to make Letty,
whose heart was now beating in a very thicket of nerves, at once
feel it impossible to carry out her intent--impossible to confess
to him any more than to his mother; while Godfrey, on his part,
perceiving her manifest shyness and unwonted embarrassment,
attributed them altogether to his own wisely guarded behavior,
and, seeing therein no sign of loss of influence, continued his
caution. Thus the pride, which is of man, mingled with the love,
which is of God, and polluted it. From that hour he began to lord
it over the girl; and this change in his behavior immediately
reacted on himself, in the obscure perception that there might be
danger to her in continued freedom of intercourse: he must,
therefore, he concluded, order the way for both; he must take
care of her as well as of himself. But was it consistent with
this resolve that he should, for a whole month, spend every
leisure moment in working at a present for her--a written marvel
of neatness and legibility?

Again, by this meeting askance, as it were, another
disintegrating force was called into operation: the moment Letty
knew she could not tell Godfrey, and that therefore a wall had
arisen between him and her, that moment woke in her the desire,
as she had never felt it before, to see Tom Helmer. She could no
longer bear to be shut up in herself; she must see somebody, get
near to somebody, talk to somebody; her secret would choke her
otherwise, would swell and break her heart; and who was there to
think of but Tom--and Mary Marston?

She had never once gone to the oak again, but she had not
altogether avoided a certain little cobwebbed gable-window in the
garret, from which it was visible; neither had she withheld her
hands from cleaning a pane in that window, that through it she
might see the oak; and there, more than once or twice, now
thickening the huge limb, now spotting the grass beneath it, she
had descried a dark object, which could be nothing else than Tom
Helmer on the watch for herself. He must surely be her friend,
she reasoned, or how would he care, day after day, to climb a
tree to look if she were coming--she who was the veriest nobody
in all other eyes but his? It was so good of Tom! She
_would_ call him Tom; everybody else called him Tom, and why
shouldn't she--to herself, when nobody was near? As to Mary
Marston, she treated her like a child! When she told her that she
had met Tom at Durnmelling, and how kind he had been, she looked
as grave as if it had been wicked to be civil to him; and told
her in return how he and his mother were always quarreling: that
must be his mother's fault, she was sure-it could not be Tom's;
any one might see that at a glance! His mother must be something
like her aunt! But, after that, how could she tell Mary any more?
It would not be fair to Tom, for, like the rest, she would
certainly begin to abuse him. What harm could come of it? and, if
harm did, how could she help it! If they had been kind to her,
she would have told them everything, but they all frightened her
so, she could not speak. It was not her fault if Tom was the only
friend she had! She _would_ ask his advice; he was sure to
advise her just the right thing. He had read that sonnet about
the wise virgin with such feeling and such force, he _must_
know what a girl ought to do, and how she ought to behave to
those who were unkind and would not trust her.

Poor Letty! she had no stay, no root in herself yet. Well do I
know not one human being ought, even were it possible, to be
enough for himself; each of us needs God and every human soul he
has made, before he has enough; but we ought each to be able, in
the hope of what is one day to come, to endure for a time, not
having enough. Letty was unblamable that she desired the comfort
of humanity around her soul, but I am not sure that she was quite
unblamable in not being fit to walk a few steps alone, or even to
sit still and expect. With all his learning, Godfrey had not
taught her what William Marston had taught Mary; and now her
heart was like a child left alone in a great room. She had not
yet learned that we must each bear his own burden, and so become
able to bear each the burden of the other. Poor friends we are,
if we are capable only of leaning, and able never to support.

But the moment Letty's heart had thus cried out against Mary,
came a shock, and something else cried out against herself,
telling her that she was not fair to her friend, and that Mary,
and no other, was the proper person to advise with in this
emergency of her affairs. She had no right to turn from her
because she was a little afraid of her. Perhaps Letty was on the
point of discovering that to be unable to bear disapproval was an
unworthy weakness. But in her case it came nowise of the pride
which blame stirs to resentment, but altogether of the self-
depreciation which disapproval rouses to yet greater dispiriting.
Praise was to her a precious thing, in part because it made her
feel as if she could go on; blame, a misery, in part because it
made her feel as if all was of no use, she never could do
anything right. She had not yet learned that the right is the
right, come of praise or blame what may. The right will produce
more right and be its own reward--in the end a reward altogether
infinite, for God will meet it with what is deeper than all
right, namely, perfect love. But the more Letty thought, the more
she was sure she must tell Mary; and, disapprove as she might,
Mary was a very different object of alarm from either her aunt or
her cousin Godfrey.

The first afternoon, therefore, on which she thought her aunt
could spare her, she begged leave to go and see Mary. Mrs.
Wardour yielded it, but not very graciously. She had, indeed,
granted that Miss Marston was not like other shop-girls, but she
did not favor the growth of the intimacy, and liked Letty's going
to her less than Mary's coming to Thornwick.




CHAPTER X.

THE HEATH AND THE HUT.


Letty seldom went into the shop, except to buy, for she knew Mr.
Turnbull would not like it, and Mary did not encourage it; but
now her misery made her bold. Mary saw the trouble in her eyes,
and without a moment's hesitation drew her inside the counter,
and thence into the house, where she led the way to her own room,
up stairs and through passages which were indeed lanes through
masses of merchandise, like those cut through deep-drifted snow.
It was shop all over the house, till they came to the door of
Mary's chamber, which, opening from such surroundings, had upon
Letty much the effect of a chapel--and rightly, for it was a room
not unused to having its door shut. It was small, and plainly but
daintily furnished, with no foolish excess of the small
refinements on which girls so often set value, spending large
time on what it would be waste to buy: only they have to kill the
weary captive they know not how to redeem, for he troubles them
with his moans.

"Sit down, Letty dear, and tell me what is the matter," said
Mary, placing her friend in a chintz-covered straw chair, and
seating herself beside her.

Letty burst into tears, and sat sobbing.

"Come, dear, tell me all about it," insisted Mary. "If you don't
make haste, they will be calling me."

Letty could not speak.

"Then I'll tell you what," said Mary; "you must stop with me to-
night, that we may have time to talk it over. You sit here and
amuse yourself as well as you can till the shop is shut, and then
we shall have such a talk! I will send your tea up here. Beenie
will be good to you."

"Oh, but, indeed, I can't!" sobbed Letty; "my aunt would never
forgive me."

"You silly child! I never meant to keep you without sending to
your aunt to let her know."

"She won't let me stop," persisted Letty.

"We will try her," said Mary, confidently; and, without more ado,
left Letty, and, going to her desk in the shop, wrote a note to
Mrs. Wardour. This she gave to Beenie to send by special
messenger to Thornwick; after which, she told her, she must take
up a nice tea to Miss Lovel in her bedroom. Mary then resumed her
place in the shop, under the frowns and side-glances of Turnbull,
and the smile of her father, pleased at her reappearance from
even such a short absence.

But the return, in an hour or so, of the boy-messenger, whom
Beenie had taken care not to pay beforehand, destroyed the hope
of a pleasant evening; for he brought a note from Mrs. Wardour,
absolutely refusing to allow Letty to spend the night from home:
she must return immediately, so as to get in before dark.

The rare anger flushed Letty's cheek and flashed from her eyes as
she read; for, in addition to the prime annoyance, her aunt's
note was addressed to her and not to Mary, to whom it did not
even allude. Mary only smiled inwardly at this, but Letty felt
deeply hurt, and her displeasure with her aunt added yet a shade
to the dimness of her judgment. She rose at once.

"Will you not tell me first what is troubling you, Letty?" said
Mary.

"No, dear, not now," replied Letty, caring a good deal less about
the right ordering of her way than when she entered the house.
Why should she care, she said to herself--but it was her anger
speaking in her--how she behaved, when she was treated so
abominably?

"Then I will come and see you on Sunday," said Mary; "and then we
shall manage to have our talk."

They kissed and parted--Letty unaware that she had given her
friend a less warm kiss than usual. There can hardly be a plainer
proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of
the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this,
that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind: Letty
was angry with every person and thing at Thornwick, and unkind to
her best friend, for whose sake in part she was angry. With
glowing cheeks, tear-filled eyes, and indignant heart she set out
on her walk home.

It was a still evening, with a great cloud rising in the
southwest; from which, as the sun drew near the horizon, a thin
veil stretched over the sky between, and a few drops came
scattering. This was in harmony with Letty's mood. Her soul was
clouded, and her heaven was only a place for the rain to fall
from. Annoyance, doubt, her new sense of constraint, and a wide-
reaching, undefined feeling of homelessness, all wrought together
to make her mind a chaos out of which misshapen things might
rise, instead of an ordered world in which gracious and
reasonable shapes appear. For as the place such will be the
thoughts that spring there; when all in us is peace divine, then,
and not till then, shall we think the absolutely reasonable.
Alas, that by our thoughtlessness or unkindness we should so
often be the cause of monster-births, and those even in the minds
of the loved! that we should be, if but for a moment, the demons
that deform a fair world that loves us! Such was Mrs. Wardour,
with her worldly wisdom, that day to Letty.

About half-way to Thornwick, the path crossed a little heathy
common; and just as Letty left the hedge-guarded field-side, and
through a gate stepped, as it were, afresh out of doors on the
open common, the wind came with a burst, and brought the rain in
earnest. It was not yet very heavy, but heavy enough, with the
wind at its back, and she with no defense but her parasol, to wet
her thoroughly before she could reach any shelter, the nearest
being a solitary, decrepit old hawthorn-tree, about half-way
across the common. She bent her head to the blast, and walked on.
She had no desire for shelter. She would like to get wet to the
skin, take a violent cold, go into a consumption, and die in a
fortnight. The wind whistled about her bonnet, dashed the rain-
drops clanging on the drum-tight silk of her parasol, and made of
her skirts fetters and chains. She could hardly get along, and
was just going to take down her parasol, when suddenly, where was
neither house nor hedge nor tree, came a lull. For from behind,
over head and parasol, had come an umbrella, and now came a voice
and an audible sigh of pleasure.

"I little thought when I left home this afternoon," said the
voice, "that I should have such a happiness before night!"

At the sound of the voice Letty gave a cry, which ran through all
the shapes of alarm, of surprise, of delight; and it was not much
of a cry either.

"O Tom!" she said, and clasped the arm that held the umbrella.
How her foolish heart bounded! Here was help when she had sought
none, and where least she had hoped for any! Her aunt would have
her run from under the umbrella at once, no doubt, but she would
do as she pleased this time. Here was Tom getting as wet as a
spaniel for her sake, and counting it a happiness! Oh, to have a
friend like that--all to herself! She would not reject such a
friend for all the aunts in creation. Besides, it was her aunt's
own fault; if she had let her stay with Mary, she would not have
met Tom. It was not her doing; she would take what was sent her,
and enjoy it! But, at the sound of her own voice calling him Tom,
the blood rushed to her cheeks, and she felt their glow in the
heart of the chill-beating rain.

"What a night for you to be out in, Letty," responded Tom, taking
instant advantage of the right she had given him. "How lucky it
was I chose the right place to watch in at last! I was sure, if
only I persevered long enough, I should be rewarded."

"Have you been waiting for me long?" asked Letty, with foolish
acceptance.

"A fortnight and a day," answered Tom, with a laugh. "But I would
wait a long year for such another chance as this." And he pressed
to his side the hand upon his arm. "Fate is indeed kind to-
night."

"Hardly in the weather," said Letty, fast recovering her spirits.

"Not?" said Tom, with seeming pretense of indignation. "Let any
one but yourself dare to say a word against the weather of this
night, and he will have me to reckon with. It's the sweetest
weather I ever walked in. I will write a glorious song in praise
of showery gusts and bare commons."

"Do," said Letty, careful not to say Tom this time, but unwilling
to revert to Mr. Helmer, "and mind you bring in the umbrella."

"That I will! See if I don't!" answered Tom.

"And make it real poetry too?" asked Letty, looking archly round
the stick of the umbrella.

"Thou shalt thyself be the lovely critic, fair maiden!" answered
Tom.

And thus they were already on the footing of somewhere about a
two years' acquaintance--thanks to the smart of ill-usage in
Letty's bosom, the gayety in Tom's, the sudden wild weather, the
quiet heath, the gathering shades, and the umbrella! The wind
blew cold, the air was dank and chill, the west was a low gleam
of wet yellow, and the rain shot stinging in their faces; but
Letty cared quite as little for it all as Tom did, for her heart,
growing warm with the comfort of the friendly presence, felt like
a banished soul that has found a world; and a joy as of endless
deliverance pervaded her being. And neither to her nor to Tom
must we deny our sympathy in the pleasure which, walking over a
bog, they drew from the flowers that mantled awful deeps; they
will not sink until they stop, and begin to build their house
upon it. Within that umbrella, hovered, and glided with them, an
atmosphere of bliss and peace and rose-odors. In the midst of
storm and coming darkness, it closed warm and genial around the
pair. Tom meditated no guile, and Letty had no deceit in her. Yet
was Tom no true man, or sweet Letty much of a woman. Neither of
them was yet _of the truth._

At the other side of the heath, almost upon the path, stood a
deserted hut; door and window were gone, but the roof remained:
just as they neared it, the wind fell, and the rain began to come
down in earnest.

"Let us go in here for a moment," said Tom, "and get our breath
for a new fight."

Letty said nothing, but Tom felt she was reluctant.

"Not a soul will pass to-night," he said. "We mustn't get wet to
the skin."

Letty felt, or fancied, refusal would be more unmaidenly than
consent, and allowed Tom to lead her in. And there, within those
dismal walls, the twilight sinking into a cheerless night of
rain, encouraged by the very dreariness and obscurity of the
place, she told Tom the trouble of mind their interview at the
oak was causing her, saying that now it would be worse than ever,
for it was altogether impossible to confess that she had met him
yet again that evening.

So now, indeed, Letty's foot was in the snare: she had a secret
with Tom. Every time she saw him, liberty had withdrawn a pace.
There was no room for confession now. If a secret held be a
burden, a secret shared is a fetter. But Tom's heart rejoiced
within him.

"Let me see!--How old are you, Letty?" he asked gayly.

"Eighteen past," she answered.

"Then you are fit to judge for yourself. You ain't a child, and
they are not your father and mother. What right have they to know
everything you do? I wouldn't let any such nonsense trouble me."

"But they give me everything, you know--food, and clothes, and
all."

"Ah, just so!" returned Tom. "And what do you do for them?"

"Nothing."

"Why! what are you about all day?"

Letty gave him a brief sketch of her day.

"And you call that nothing?" exclaimed Tom. "Ain't that enough to
pay for your food and your clothes? Does it want your private
affairs to make up the difference? Or have you to pay for your
food and clothes with your very thoughts?--What pocket-money do
they give you?"

"Pocket-money?" returned Letty, as if she did not quite know what
he meant.

"Money to do what you like with," explained Tom.

Letty thought for a moment.

"Cousin Godfrey gave me a sovereign last Christmas," she
answered. "I have got ten shillings of it yet."

Tom burst into a merry laugh.

"Oh, you dear creature!" he cried. "What a sweet slave you make!
The lowest servant on the farm gets wages, and you get none: yet
you think yourself bound to tell them everything, because they
give you food and clothes, and a sovereign last Christmas!"

Here a gentle displeasure arose in the heart of the girl,
hitherto so contented and grateful. She did not care about money,
but she resented the claim her conscience made for them upon her
confidence. She did not reflect that such claim had never been
made by them; nor that the fact that she felt the claim, proved
that she had been treated, in some measure at least, like a
daughter of the house.

"Why," continued Tom, "it is mere, downright, rank slavery! You
are walking to the sound of your own chains. Of course, you are
not to do anything wrong, but you are not bound not to do
anything they may happen not to like."

In this style he went on, believing he spoke the truth, and was
teaching her to show a proper spirit. His heart, as well as
Godfrey's, was uplifted, to think he had this lovely creature to
direct and superintend: through her sweet confidence, he had to
set her free from unjust oppression taking advantage of her
simplicity. But in very truth he was giving her just the
instruction that goes to make a slave--the slave in heart, who
serves without devotion, and serves unworthily. Yet in this, and
much more such poverty-stricken, swine-husk argument, Letty
seemed to hear a gospel of liberty, and scarcely needed the
following injunctions of Tom, to make a firm resolve not to utter
a word concerning him. To do so would be treacherous to him, and
would be to forfeit the liberty he had taught her! Thus, from the
neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

"If you do," Tom had said, "I shall never see you again: they
will set every one about the place to watch you, like so many
cats after one poor little white mousey, and on the least
suspicion, one way or another, you will be gobbled up, as sure as
fate, before you can get to me to take care of you."

Letty looked up at him gratefully.

"But what could you do for me if I did?" she asked. "If my aunt
were to turn me out of the house, your mother would not take me
in!"

Letty was not herself now; she was herself and Tom--by no means a
healthful combination.

"My mother won't be mistress long," answered Tom. "She will have
to do as I bid her when I am one-and-twenty, and that will be in
a few months." Tom did not know the terms of his father's will.
"In the mean time we must keep quiet, you know. I don't want a
row--we have plenty of row as it is. You may be sure _I_
shall tell no one how I spent the happiest hour of my life. How
little circumstance has to do with bliss!" he added, with a
philosophical sigh. "Here we are in a wretched hut, roared and
rained upon by an equinoctial tempest, and I am in paradise!"

"I must go home," said Letty, recalled to a sense of her
situation, yet set trembling with pleasure, by his words. "See,
it is getting quite dark!"

"Don't be afraid, my white bird," said Tom. "I will see you home.
But surely you are as well here as there anyhow! Who knows when
we shall meet again? Don't be alarmed; I'm not going to ask you
to meet me anywhere; I know your sweet innocence would make you
fancy it wrong, and then you would be unhappy. But that is no
reason why I should not fall in with you when I have the chance.
It is very hard that two people who understand each other can not
be friends without other people shoving in their ugly beaks!
Where is the harm to any one if we choose to have a few minutes'
talk together now and then?"

"Where, indeed?" responded Letty shyly.

A tall shadow--no shadow either, but the very person of Godfrey
Wardour--passed the opening in the wall of the hut where once had
been a window, and the gloom it cast into the dusk within was
awful and ominous. The moment he saw it, Tom threw himself flat
on the clay floor of the hut. Godfrey stopped at the doorless
entrance, and stood on the threshold, bending his head to clear
the lintel as he looked in. Letty's heart seemed to vanish from
her body. A strange feeling shook her, as if some mysterious
transformation were about to pass upon her whole frame, and she
were about to be changed into some one of the lower animals. The
question, where was the harm, late so triumphantly put, seemed to
have no heart in it now. For a moment that had to Letty the air
of an aeon, Godfrey stood peering.

Not a little to his displeasure, he had heard from his mother of
her refusal to grant Letty's request, and had set out in the hope
of meeting and helping her home, for by that time it had begun to
rain, and looked stormy.

In the darkness he saw something white, and, as he gazed, it grew
to Letty's face. The strange, scared, ghastly expression of it
bewildered him.

Letty became aware that Godfrey did not recognize her at first,
and the hope sprung up in her heart that he might not see Tom at
all; but she could not utter a word, and stood returning
Godfrey's gaze like one fascinated with terror. Presently her
heart began again to bear witness in violent piston-strokes.

"Is it really you, my child?" said Godfrey, in an uncertain
voice--for, if it was indeed she, why did she not speak, and why
did she look so scared at the sight of him?

"O Cousin Godfrey!" gasped Letty, then first finding a little
voice, "you gave me such a start!"

"Why should you be so startled at seeing me, Letty?" he returned.
"Am I such a monster of the darkness, then?"

"You came all at once," replied Letty, gathering courage from the
playfulness of his tone, "and blocked up the door with your
shoulders, so that not a ray of light fell on your face; and how
was I to know it was you, Cousin Godfrey?"

From a paleness grayer than death, her face was now red as fire;
it was the burning of the lie inside her. She felt all a lie now:
there was the good that Tom had brought her! But the gloom was
friendly. With a resolution new to herself, she went up to
Godfrey and said:

"If you are going to the town, let me walk with you, Cousin
Godfrey. It is getting so dark."

She felt as if an evil necessity--a thing in which man must not
believe--were driving her. But the poor child was not half so
deceitful inside as the words seemed to her issuing from her
lips. It was such a relief to be assured Godfrey had not seen
Tom, that she felt as if she could forego the sight of Tom for
evermore. Her better feelings rushed back, her old confidence and
reverence; and, in the altogether nebulo-chaotic condition of her
mind, she felt as if, in his turn, Godfrey had just appeared for
her deliverance.

"I am not going to the town, Letty," he answered. "I came to meet
you, and we will go home together. It is no use waiting for the
rain to stop, and about as little to put up an umbrella, I have
brought your waterproof, and we must just take it as it comes."

The wind was up again, and the next moment Letty, on Godfrey's
arm, was struggling with the same storm she had so lately
encountered leaning on Tom's, while Tom was only too glad to be
left alone on the floor of the dismal hut, whence he did not
venture to rise for some time, lest any the most improbable thing
should happen, to bring Mr. Wardour back. He was as mortally
afraid of being discovered as any young thief in a farmer's
orchard.

He had a dreary walk back to the public house where he had
stabled his horse; but he trudged it cheerfully, brooding with
delight on Letty's beauty, and her lovely confidence in Tom
Helmer--a personage whom he had begun to feel nobody trusted as
he deserved.

"Poor child!" he said to himself--he as well as Godfrey
patronized her--"what a doleful walk home she will have with that
stuck-up old bachelor fellow!"

Nor, indeed, was it a very comfortable walk home she had,
although Godfrey talked all the way, as well as a head-wind, full
of rain, would permit. A few weeks ago she would have thought the
walk and the talk and everything delightful. But after Tom's airy
converse on the same level with herself, Godfrey's sounded indeed
wise--very wise--but dull, so dull! It is true the suspicion,
hardly awake enough to be troublous, lay somewhere in her, that
in Godfrey's talk there was a value of which in Tom's there was
nothing; but then it was not wisdom Letty was in want of, she
thought, but somebody to be kind to her--as kind as she should
like; somebody, though she did not say this even to herself, to
pet her a little, and humor her, and not require too much of her.
Physically, Letty was not in the least lazy, but she did not
enjoy being forced to think much. She could think, and to no very
poor purpose either, but as yet she had no hunger for the
possible results of thought, and how then could she care to
think? Seated on the edge of her bed, weary and wet and self-
accused, she recalled, and pondered, and, after her faculty,
compared the two scarce comparable men, until the voice of her
aunt, calling to her to make haste and come to tea, made her
start up, and in haste remove her drenched garments. The old lady
imagined from her delay she was out of temper because she had
sent for her home; but, when she appeared, she was so ready, so
attentive, and so quick to help, that, a little repentant, she
said to herself, "Really the girl is very good-natured!" as if
then first she discovered the fact. But Thornwick could never
more to Letty feel like a home! Not at peace with herself, she
could not be in rhythmic relation with her surroundings.

The next day, the old manner of life began again; but, alas! it
was only the old manner, it was not the old life; that was gone
for ever, like an old sunset, or an old song, and could not be
recalled from the dead. We may have better, but we can not have
the same. God only can have the same. God grant our new may
inwrap our old! Letty labored more than ever to lay hold of the
lessons, to his mind so genial, in hers bringing forth more labor
than fruit, which Godfrey set before her, but success seemed
further from her than ever. She was now all the time aware of a
weight, an oppression, which seemed to belong to the task, but
was in reality her self-dissatisfaction. She was like a poor
Hebrew set to make brick without straw, but the Egyptian that had
brought her into bondage was the feebleness of her own will. Now
and then would come a break--a glow of beauty, a gleam of truth;
for a moment she would forget herself; for a moment a shining
pool would flash on the clouded sea of her life; presently her
heart would send up a fresh mist, the light would fade and
vanish, and the sea lie dusky and sad. Not seldom reproaching
herself with having given Tom cause to think unjustly of her
guardians, she would try harder than ever to please her aunt; and
the small personal services she had been in the way of rendering
to Godfrey were now ministered with the care of a devotee. Not
once should he miss a button from a shirt or find a sock
insufficiently darned! But even this conscience of service did
not make her happy. Duty itself could not, where faith was
wanting, where the heart was not at one with those to whom the
hands were servants. She would cry herself to sleep, and rise
early to be sad. She resolved at last, and seemed to gain
strength and some peace from the resolve, to do all in her power
to avoid Tom; and certainly not once did she try to meet him. Not
with him, she could resist him.

Thus it went on. Her aunt saw that something was amiss, and
watched her, without attempt at concealment, which added greatly
to Letty's discomfort. But the only thing her keenness discovered
was, that the girl was forwardly eager to please Godfrey, and the
conviction began to grow that she was indulging the impudent
presumption of being in love with her peerless cousin. Then
maternal indignation misled her into the folly of dropping hints
that should put Godfrey on his guard: men were so easily taken in
by designing girls! She did not say much; but she said a good
deal too much for her own ends, when she caused her fancy to
present itself to the mind of Godfrey.

He had not failed, no one could have failed, to observe the
dejection that had for some time ruled every feature and
expression of the girl's countenance. Again and again he had
asked himself whether she might not be fancying him displeased
with her; for he knew well that, becoming more and more aware of
what he counted his danger, he had kept of late stricter guard
than ever over his behavior; but, watching her now with the
misleading light of his mother's lantern, nor quite unwilling, I
am bound to confess, that the thing might be as she implied, he
became by degrees convinced that she was right.

So far as this, perhaps, the man was pardonable--with a mother to
cause him to err. But, for what followed, punishment was
inevitable. He had a true and strong affection for the girl, but
it was an affection as from conscious high to low; an affection,
that is, not unmixed with patronage--a bad thing--far worse than
it can seem to the heart that indulges it. He still recoiled,
therefore, from the idea of such a leveling of himself as he
counted it would be to show her anything like the love of a
lover. All pride is more or less mean, but one pride may be
grander than another, and Godfrey was not herein proud in any
grand way. Good fellow as he was, he thought much too much of
himself; and, unconsciously comparing it with Letty's, altogether
overvalued his worth. Stranger than any bedfellow misery ever
acquainted a man withal, are the heart-fellows he carries about
with him. Noble as in many ways Wardour was, and kind as, to
Letty, he thought he always was, he was not generous toward her;
he was not Prince Arthur, "the Knight of Magnificence." Something
may perhaps be allowed on the score of the early experience
because of which he had resolved--pridefully, it is true--never
again to come under the power of a woman; it was unworthy of any
man, he said, to place his peace in a hand which could
thenceforth wring his whole being with agony. But, had he now
brought himself as severely to task as he ought, he would have
discovered that he was making no objection to the little girl's
loving him, only he would not love her in the same way in return;
and where was the honor in that? Doubtless, had he thus examined
himself, he would have thought he meant to take care that the
child's love for him should not go too far--should not endanger
her peace; and that, if the thing should give her trouble, it
should be his business to comfort her in it; but descend he would
not--would not _yet_--from his pedestal, to meet the silly
thing on the level ground of humanity, and the relation of the
man and the woman! Something like this, I say, he would have
found in his heart, horrid as it reads. That heart's action was
not even, was not healthy.

When in London he had ransacked Holywell Street for dainty
editions of so many of his favorite authors as would make quite a
little library for Letty; and on his return, had commissioned a
cabinet-maker in Testbridge to put together a small set of book-
shelves, after his own design, measured and fitted to receive
them exactly; these shelves, now ready, he fastened to her wall
one afternoon when she was out of the way, and filled them with
the books. He never doubted that, the moment she saw them, she
would rush to find him; and, when he had done, retreated,
therefore, to his study, there to sit in readiness to receive her
and her gratitude with gentle kindness; when he would express the
hope that she would make real friends of the spirits whose
quintessence he had thus stored to her hand; and would introduce
her to what Milton says in his "Areopagitica" concerning good
books. There, for her sake, then, he sat, in mental state,
expectant; but sat in vain. When they met at tea, then, in the
presence of his mother, with embarrassment and broken utterance,
she did thank him.

"O Cousin Godfrey!" she said, and ceased; then, "It is so much
more than I deserve, I dare hardly thank you." After another
pause, with a shake of her pretty head, as if she would toss
aside her hair, or the tears out of her eyes, "I don't know--I
seem to have no right to thank you; I ought not to have such a
splendid present. Indeed, I don't deserve it. You would not give
it me if you knew how naughty I am."

These broken sentences were by both mother and son altogether
misinterpreted. The mother, now hearing for the first time of
Godfrey's present, was filled with jealousy, and began to revolve
thoughts of dire disquietude: was the hussy actually beginning to
gain her point, and steal from her the heart of her son? Was it
in the girl's blood to wrong her? The father of her had wronged
her: she would take care his daughter should not! She had taken a
viper to her bosom! Who was _she_, to wriggle herself into
an old family and property? Had _she_ been born to such
things? She would teach her who she was! When dependents began to
presume, it was time they had a lesson.

Letty could not bear the sight of the books and their shelves;
the very beauty of the bindings was a reproach to her. From the
misery of this fresh burden, this new stirring of her sense of
hypocrisy, she began to wish herself anywhere out of the house,
and away from Thornwick. It was torture to her to think how she
had deceived Cousin Godfrey at the hut; and throughout the night,
across the darkness, she felt, though she could not see, the
books gazing at her, like an embodied conscience, from the wall
of her chamber. Twenty times that night she started from her
sleep, saying, "I will go where they shall never see me"; then
rose with the dawn, and set herself to the hardest work she could
find.

The next day was Sunday, and they all went to church. Letty felt
that Tom was there, too, but she never raised her eyes to glance
at him.

He had been looking out in vain for a sight of her--now from the
oak-tree, now from his bay mare's back, as he haunted the roads
about Thornwick, now from the window of the little public-house
where the path across the fields joined the main road to
Testbridge: but not once had he caught a glimpse of her.

He had seated himself where he could not fail to see her if she
were in the Thornwick pew. How ill she looked! His heart swelled
with indignation.

"They are cruel to her," he said; "that is plain. Poor girl, they
will kill her! She is a pearl in the oyster-maw of Thornwick.
This will never do; I _must_ see her somehow!"

If at this crisis Letty had but had a real friend to strengthen
and advise her, much suffering might have been spared her, for
never was there a more teachable girl. She was, indeed, only too
ready to be advised, too ready to accept for true whatever
friendship offered itself. None but the friend who will
strengthen us to stand, is worthy of the name. Such a friend Mary
would have been, but Letty did not yet know what she needed. The
unrest of her conscience made her shrink from one who was sure to
side with that conscience, and help it to trouble her. It was
sympathy Letty longed for, not strength, and therefore she was
afraid of Mary. She came to see her, as she had promised, the
Sunday after that disastrous visit; but the weather was still
uncertain and gusty, and she found both her and Godfrey in the
parlor; nor did Letty give her a chance of speaking to her alone.
The poor girl had now far more on her mind that needed help than
then when she went in search of it, but she would seek it no more
from her! For, the more she thought, the surer she felt that Mary
would insist on her making a disclosure of the whole foolish
business to Mrs. Wardour, and would admit neither her own fear
nor her aunt's harshness as reason sufficient to the contrary.
"More than that," thought Letty, "I can't be sure she wouldn't
go, in spite of me, and tell her all about it! and what would
become of me then? I should be worse off a hundred times than if
I had told her myself."




CHAPTER XL

WILLIAM MARSTON.


The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of
altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no
troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come
of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own.
Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the
wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve
the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial
visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the
misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful
joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children.
Beautiful are the feet of the men of science on the dust-heaps of
the world, but the patient heart will yield a myriad times
greater thanks for the clouds that give foothold to the shining
angels.

Few people were interested in William Marston. Of those who saw
him in the shop, most turned from him to his jolly partner. But a
few there were who, some by instinct, some from experience, did
look for him behind the counter, and were disappointed if he were
absent: most of them had a repugnance to the over-complaisant
Turnbull. Yet Marston was the one whom the wise world of
Testbridge called the hypocrite, and Turnbull was the plain-
spoken, agreeable, honest man of the world, pretending to be no
better either than himself or than other people. The few friends,
however, that Marston bad, loved him as not many are loved: they
knew him, not as he seemed to the careless eye, but as he was.
Never did man do less either to conceal or to manifest himself.
He was all taken up with what he loved, and that was neither
himself nor his business. These friends knew that, when the far-
away look was on him, when his face was paler, and he seemed
unaware of person or thing about him, he was not indifferent to
their presence, or careless of their existence; it was only that
his thoughts were out, like heavenly bees, foraging; a word of
direct address brought him back in a moment, and his soul would
return to them with a smile. He stood as one on the keystone of a
bridge, and held communion now with these, now with those: on
this side the river and on that, both companies were his own.

He was not a man of much education, in the vulgar use of the
word; but he was a good way on in that education, for the sake of
which, and for no other without it, we are here in our
consciousness--the education which, once begun, will, soon or
slow, lead knowledge captive, and teaches nothing that has to be
unlearned again, because every flower of it scatters the seed of
one better than itself. The main secret of his progress, the
secret of all wisdom, was, that with him action was the beginning
and end of thought. He was not one of that cloud of false
witnesses, who, calling themselves Christians, take no trouble
for the end for which Christ was born, namely, their salvation
from unrighteousness--a class that may be divided into the
insipid and the offensive, both regardless of obedience, the
former indifferent to, the latter contentious for doctrine.

It may well seem strange that such a man should have gone into
business with such another as John Turnbull; but the latter had
been growing more and more common, while Marston had been growing
more and more refined. Still from the first it was an unequal
yoking of believer with unbeliever--just as certainly, although
not with quite such wretched results, as would have been the
marriage of Mary Marston and George Turnbull. And it had been a
great trial: punishment had not been spared--with best results in
patience and purification; for so are our false steps turned back
to good by the evil to which they lead us. Turnbull was ready to
take every safe advantage to be gained from his partner's
comparative carelessness about money. He drew a larger proportion
of the profits than belonged to his share in the capital,
justifying himself on the ground that he had a much larger
family, did more of the business, and had to keep up the standing
of the firm. He made him pay more than was reasonable for the
small part of the house yielded from storage to the accommodation
of him, his daughter, and their servant, notwithstanding that, if
they had not lived there, some one must have been paid to do so.
Far more than this, careless of his partner's rights, and
insensible to his interests, he had for some time been risking
the whole affair by private speculations. After all, Marston was
the safer man of business, even from the worldly point of view.
Alone, it is true, he would hardly have made money, but he would
have got through, and would have left his daughter the means of
getting through also; for he would have left her in possession of
her own peace and the confidence of her friends, which will
always prove enough for those who confess themselves to be
strangers and pilgrims on the earth--those who regard it as a
grand staircase they have to climb, not a plain on which to build
their houses and plant their vineyards.

As to the peculiar doctrines of the sect to which he had joined
himself, right or wrong in themselves, Marston, after having
complied with what seemed to him the letter of the law concerning
baptism, gave himself no further trouble. He had for a long time
known--for, by the power of the life in him, he had gathered from
the Scriptures the finest of the wheat, where so many of every
sect, great church and little church, gather only the husks and
chaff--that the only baptism of any avail is the washing of the
fresh birth, and the making new by that breath of God, which,
breathed into man's nostrils, first made of him a living soul.
When a man _knows_ this, potentially he knows all things.
But, _just therefore_, he did not stand high with his sect
any more than with his customers, though--a fact which Marston
himself never suspected--the influence of his position had made
them choose him for a deacon. One evening George had had leave to
go home early, because of a party at _the villa_, as the
Turnbulls always called their house; and, the boy having also for
some cause got leave of absence, Mr. Marston was left to shut the
shop himself, Mary, who was in some respects the stronger of the
two, assisting him. When he had put up the last shutter, he
dropped his arms with a weary sigh. Mary, who had been fastening
the bolts inside, met him in the doorway.

"You look worn out, father," she said. "Come and lie down, and I
will read to you."

"I will, my dear," he answered. "I don't feel quite myself to-
night. The seasons tell upon me now. I suppose the stuff of my
tabernacle is wearing thin."

Mary cast an anxious look at him, for, though never a strong man,
he seldom complained. But she said nothing, and, hoping a good
cup of tea would restore him, led the way through the dark shop
to the door communicating with the house. Often as she had passed
through it thus, the picture of it as she saw it that night was
the only one almost that returned to her afterward: a few vague
streaks of light, from the cracks of the shutters, fed the rich,
warm gloom of the place; one of them fell upon a piece of orange-
colored cotton stuff, which blazed in the dark.

Arrived at their little sitting-room at the top of the stair, she
hastened to shake up the pillows and make the sofa comfortable
for him. He lay down, and she covered him with a rug; then ran to
her room for a book, and read to him while Beenie was getting the
tea. She chose a poem with which Mr. Wardour had made her
acquainted almost the last tune she was at Thornwick--that was
several weeks ago now, for plainly Letty was not so glad to see
her as she used to be--it was Milton's little ode "On Time,"
written for inscription on a clock--one of the grandest of small
poems. Her father knew next to nothing of literature; having
pondered his New Testament, however, for thirty years, he was
capable of understanding Milton's best--to the childlike mind the
best is always simplest and easiest-not unfrequently the
_only_ kind it can lay hold of. When she ended, he made her
read it again, and then again; not until she had read it six
times did he seem content. And every time she read it, Mary found
herself understanding it better. It was gradually growing very
precious.

Her father had made no remark; but, when she lifted her eyes from
the sixth reading, she saw that his face shone, and, as the last
words left her lips, he took up the line like a refrain, and
repeated it after her:

"'Triumphing over death, and chance, and thee, O Time!'

"That will do now, Mary, I thank you," he said. "I have got a
good hold of it, I think, and shall be able to comfort myself
with it when I wake in the night. The man must have been very
like the apostle Paul."

He said no more. The tea was brought, and he drank a cup of it,
but could not eat; and, as he could not, neither could Mary.

"I want a long sleep," he said; and the words went to his child's
heart--she dared not question herself why. When the tea-things
were removed, he called her.

"Mary," he said, "come here. I want to speak to you."

She kneeled beside him,

"Mary," he said again, taking her little hand in his two long,
bony ones, "I love you, my child, to that degree I can not say;
and I want you, I do want you, to be a Christian."

"So do I, father dear," answered Mary simply, the tears rushing
into her eyes at the thought that perhaps she was not one; "I
want me to be a Christian."

"Yes, my love," he went on; "but it is not that I do not think
you a Christian; it is that I want you to be a downright real
Christian, not one that is but trying to feel as a Christian
ought to feel. I have lost so much precious time in that way!"

"Tell me--tell me," cried Mary, clasping her other hand over his.
"What would you have me do?"

"I will tell you. I am just trying how," he responded. "A
Christian is just one that does what the Lord Jesus tells him.
Neither more nor less than that makes a Christian. It is not even
understanding the Lord Jesus that makes one a Christian. That
makes one dear to the Father; but it is being a Christian, that
is, doing what he tells us, that makes us understand him. Peter
says the Holy Spirit is given to them that obey him: what else is
that but just actually, really, doing what he says--just as if I
was to tell you to go and fetch me my Bible, and you would get up
and go? Did you ever do anything, my child, just because Jesus
told you to do it?"

Mary did not answer immediately. She thought awhile. Then she
spoke.

"Yes, father," she said, "I think so. Two nights ago, George was
very rude to me--I don't mean anything bad, but you know he is
very rough."

"I know it, my child. And you must not think I don't care because
I think it better not to interfere. I am with you all the time."

"Thank you, father; I know it. Well, when I was going to bed, I
was angry with him still, so it was no wonder I found I could not
say my prayers. Then I remembered how Jesus said we must forgive
or we should not be forgiven. So I forgave him with all my heart,
and kindly, too, and then I found I could pray."

The father stretched out his arms and drew her to his bosom,
murmuring, "My child! my Christ's child!" After a little he began
to talk again.

"It is a miserable thing to hear those who desire to believe
themselves Christians, talking and talking about this question
and that, the discussion of which is all for strife and nowise
for unity--not a thought among them of the one command of Christ,
to love one another. I fear some are hardly content with not
hating those who differ from them."

"I am sure, father, I try--and I think I do love everybody that
loves him," said Mary.

"Well, that is much--not enough though, my child. We must be like
Jesus, and you know that it was while we were yet sinners that
Christ died for us; therefore we must love all men, whether they
are Christians or not."

"Tell me, then, what you want me to do, father dear. I will do
whatever you tell me."

"I want you to be just like that to the Lord Christ, Mary. I want
you to look out for his will, and find it, and do it. I want you
not only to do it, though that is the main thing, when you think
of it, but to look for it, that you may do it. I need not say to
you that this is not a thing to be _talked_ about much, for
you don't do that. You may think me very silent, my love; but I
do not talk always when I am inclined, for the fear I might let
my feeling out that way, instead of doing something he wants of
me with it. And how repulsive and full of offense those generally
are who talk most! Our strength ought to go into conduct, not
into talk--least of all, into talk about what they call the
doctrines of the gospel. The man who does what God tells him,
sits at his Father's feet, and looks up in his Father's face; and
men had better leave him alone, for he can not greatly mistake
his Father, and certainly will not displease him. Look for the
lovely will, my child, that you may be its servant, its priest,
its sister, its queen, its slave--as Paul calls himself. How that
man did glory in his Master!"

"I will try, father," returned Mary, with a burst of tears. "I do
want to be good. I do want to be one of his slaves, if I may."

"_May!_ my child? You are bound to be. You have no choice
but choose it. It is what we are made for--freedom, the divine
nature, God's life, a grand, pure, open-eyed existence! It is
what Christ died for. You must not talk about _may;_ it is
all _must._"

Mary had never heard her father talk like this, and,
notwithstanding the endless interest of his words, it frightened
her. An instinctive uneasiness crept up and laid hold of her. The
unsealing hand of Death was opening the mouth of a dumb prophet.

A pause followed, and he spoke again.

"I will tell you one thing now that Jesus says: he is
unchangeable; what he says once he says always; and I mention it
now, because it may not be long before you are specially called
to mind it. It is this: _'Let not your heart be troubled.'_"

"But he said that on one particular occasion, and to his
disciples--did he not?" said Mary, willing, in her dread, to give
the conversation a turn.

"Ah, Mary!" said her father, with a smile, "_will_ you let
the questioning spirit deafen you to the teaching one? Ask
yourself, the first time you are alone, what the disciples were
not to be troubled about, and why they were not to be troubled
about it.--I am tired, and should like to go to bed."

He rose, and stood for a moment in front of the fire, winding his
old double-cased silver watch. Mary took from her side the little
gold one he had given her, and, as was her custom, handed it to
him to wind for her. The next moment he had dropped it on the
fender.

"Ah, my child!" he cried, and, stooping, gathered up a dying
thing, whose watchfulness was all over. The glass was broken; the
case was open; it lay in his hand a mangled creature. Mary heard
the rush of its departing life, as the wheels went whirring, and
the hands circled rapidly.

They stopped motionless. She looked up in her father's face with
a smile. He was looking concerned.

"I am very sorry, Mary," he said; "but, if it is past repair, I
will get you another.--You don't seem to mind it much!" he added,
and smiled himself.

"Why should I, father dear?" she replied. "When one's father
breaks one's watch, what is there to say but 'I am very glad it
was you did it'? I shall like the little thing the better for
it."

He kissed her on the forehead.

"My child, say that to your Father in heaven, when he breaks
something for you. He will do it from love, not from blundering.
I don't often preach to you, my child--do I? but somehow it comes
to me to-night."

"I will remember, father," said Mary; and she did remember.

She went with him to his bedroom, and saw that everything was
right for him. When she went again, before going to her own, he
felt more comfortable, he said, and expected to have a good
night. Relieved, she left him; but her heart would be heavy. A
shapeless sadness seemed pressing it down; it was being got ready
for what it had to bear.

When she went to his room in the middle of the night, she found
him slumbering peacefully, and went back to her own and slept
better. When she went again in the morning, he lay white,
motionless, and without a breath.

It was not in Mary's nature to give sudden vent to her feelings.
For a time she was stunned. As if her life had rushed to overtake
her departing parent, and beg a last embrace, she stood gazing
motionless. The sorrow was too huge for entrance. The thing could
not be! Not until she stooped and kissed the pale face, did the
stone in her bosom break, and yield a torrent of grief. But,
although she had left her father in that very spot the night
before, already she not only knew but felt that was not he which
lay where she had left him. He was gone, and she was alone. She
tried to pray, but her heart seemed to lie dead in her bosom, and
no prayer would rise from it. It was the time of all times when,
if ever, prayer must be the one reasonable thing--and pray she
could not. In her dull stupor she did not hear Beenie's knock.
The old woman entered, and found her on her knees, with her
forehead on one of the dead hands, while the white face of her
master lay looking up to heaven, as if praying for the living not
yet privileged to die. Then first was the peace of death broken.
Beenie gave a loud cry, and turned and ran, as if to warn the
neighbors that Death was loose in the town. Thereupon, as if
Death were a wild beast yet lurking in it, the house was filled
with noise and tumult; the sanctuary of the dead was invaded by
unhallowed presence; and the poor girl, hearing behind her voices
she did not love, raised herself from her knees, and, without
lifting her eyes, crept from the room and away to her own.

"Follow her, George," said his father, in a loud, eager whisper.
"You've got to comfort her now. That's your business, George.
There's your chance!"

The last words he called from the bottom of the stair, as George
sped up after her. "Mary! Mary, dear," he called as he ran.

But Mary had the instinct--it was hardly more--to quicken her
pace, and lock the door of her room the moment she entered. As
she turned from it, her eye fell upon her watch--where it lay,
silent and disfigured, on her dressing-table; and, with the
sight, the last words of her father came back to her. She fell
again on her knees with a fresh burst of weeping, and, while the
foolish youth was knocking unheard at her door, cried, with a
strange mixture of agony and comfort, "O my Father in heaven,
give me back William Marston!" Never in his life had she thought
of her father by his name; but death, while it made him dearer
than ever, set him away from her so, that she began to see him in
his larger individuality, as a man before the God of men, a son
before the Father of many sons: Death turns a man's sons and
daughters into his brothers and sisters. And while she kneeled,
and, with exhausted heart, let her brain go on working of itself,
as it seemed, came a dreamy vision of the Saviour with his
disciples about him, reasoning with them that they should not
give way to grief. "Let not your heart be troubled," he seemed to
be saying, "although I die, and go out of your sight. It is all
well. Take my word for it."

She rose, wiped her eyes, looked up, said, "I will try, Lord,"
and, going down, called Beenie, and sent her to ask Mr. Turnbull
to speak with her. She knew her father's ideas, and must do her
endeavor to have the funeral as simple as possible. It was a
relief to have something, anything, to do in his name.

Mr. Turnbull came, and the coarse man was kind. It went not a
little against the grain with him to order what he called a
pauper's funeral for the junior partner in the firm; but, more
desirous than ever to conciliate Mary, he promised all that she
wished.

"Marston was but a poor-spirited fellow," he said to his wife
when he told her; "the thing is a disgrace to the shop, but it's
fit enough for him.--It will be so much money saved," he added in
self-consolation, while his wife turned up her nose, as she
always did at any mention of the shop.

Mary returned to her father's room, now silent again with the air
of that which is not. She took from the table the old silver
watch. It went on measuring the time by a scale now useless to
its owner. She placed it lovingly in her bosom, and sat down by
the bedside. Already, through love, sorrow, and obedience, she
began to find herself drawing nearer to him than she had ever
been before; already she was able to recall his last words, and
strengthen her resolve to keep them. And, sitting thus, holding
vague companionship with the merely mortal, the presence of that
which was not her father, which was like him only to remind her
that it was not he, and which must so soon cease to resemble him,
there sprang, as in the very footprint of Death, yet another
flower of rarest comfort--a strong feeling, namely, of the
briefness of time, and the certainty of the messenger's return to
fetch herself. Her soul did not sink into peace, but a strange
peace awoke in her spirit. She heard the spring of the great
clock that measures the years rushing rapidly down with a
feverous whir, and saw the hands that measure the weeks and
months careering around its face; while Death, like one of the
white-robed angels in the tomb of the Lord, sat watching, with
patient smile, for the hour when he should be wanted to go for
her. Thus mingled her broken watch, her father's death, and Jean
Paul's dream; and the fancy might well comfort her.

I will not linger much more over the crumbling time. It is good
for those who are in it, specially good for those who come out of
it chastened and resolved; but I doubt if any prolonged
contemplation of death is desirable for those whose business it
now is to live, and whose fate it is ere long to die. It is a
closing of God's hand upon us to squeeze some of the bad blood
out of us, and, when it relaxes, we must live the more
diligently--not to get ready for death, but to get more life. I
will relate only one thing yet, belonging to this twilight time.




CHAPTER XII.

MARY'S DREAM.


That night, and every night until the dust was laid to the dust,
Mary slept well; and through the days she had great composure;
but, when the funeral was over, came a collapse and a change. The
moment it became necessary to look on the world as unchanged, and
resume former relations with it, then, first, a fuller sense of
her lonely desolation declared itself. When she said good night
to Beenie, and went to her chamber, over that where the loved
parent and friend would fall asleep no more, she felt as if she
went walking along to her tomb.

That night was the first herald of the coming winter, and blew a
cold blast from his horn. All day the wind had been out. Wildly
in the churchyard it had pulled at the long grass, as if it would
tear it from its roots in the graves; it had struck vague sounds,
as from a hollow world, out of the great bell overhead in the
huge tower; and it had beat loud and fierce against the corner-
buttresses which went stretching up out of the earth, like arms
to hold steady and fast the lighthouse of the dead above the sea
which held them drowned below; despairingly had the gray clouds
drifted over the sky; and, like white clouds pinioned below, and
shadows that could not escape, the surplice of the ministering
priest and the garments of the mourners had flapped and fluttered
as in captive terror; the only still things were the coffin and
the church--and the soul which had risen above the region of
storms in the might of Him who abolished death. At the time Mary
had noted nothing of these things; now she saw them all, as for
the first time, in minute detail, while slowly she went up the
stair and through the narrowed ways, and heard the same wind that
raved alike about the new grave and the old house, into which
latter, for all the bales banked against the walls, it found many
a chink of entrance. The smell of the linen, of the blue cloth,
and of the brown paper--things no longer to be handled by those
tender, faithful hands--was dismal and strange, and haunted her
like things that intruded, things which she had done with, and
which yet would not go away. Everything had gone dead, as it
seemed, had exhaled the soul of it, and retained but the odor of
its mortality. If for a moment a thing looked the same as before,
she wondered vaguely, unconsciously, how it could be. The
passages through the merchandise, left only wide enough for one,
seemed like those she had read of in Egyptian tombs and pyramids:
a sarcophagus ought to be waiting in her chamber. When she opened
the door of it, the bright fire, which Beenie undesired had
kindled there, startled her: the room looked unnatural,
_uncanny_, because it was cheerful. She stood for a moment
on the hearth, and in sad, dreamy mood listened to the howling
swoops of the wind, making the house quiver and shake. Now and
then would come a greater gust, and rattle the window as if in
fierce anger at its exclusion, then go shrieking and wailing
through the dark heaven. Mechanically she took her New Testament,
and, seating herself in a low chair by the fire, tried to read;
but she could not fix her thoughts, or get the meaning of a
sentence: when she had read it, there it lay, looking at her just
the same, like an unanswered riddle.

The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human
soul; and out of that now began to rise fumes of doubt and
question into Mary's heart and brain. Death was a fact. The loss,
the evanishment, the ceasing, were incontrovertible--the only
incontrovertible things: she was sure of them: could she be sure
of anything else? How could she? She had not seen Christ rise;
she had never looked upon one of the dead; never heard a voice
from the other bank; had received no certain testimony. These
were not her thoughts; she was too weary to think; they were but
the thoughts that steamed up in her, and went floating about
before her; she looked on them calmly, coldly, as they came, and
passed, or remained--saw them with indifference--there they were,
and she could not help it--weariedly, believing none of them,
unable to cope with and dispel them, hardly affected by their
presence, save with a sense of dreariness and loneliness and
wretched company. At last she fell asleep, and in a moment was
dreaming diligently. This was her dream, as nearly as she could
recall it, when she came to herself after waking from it with a
cry.

She was one of a large company at a house where she had never
been before--a beautiful house with a large garden behind. It was
a summer night, and the guests were wandering in and out at will,
and through house and garden, amid lovely things of all colors
and odors. The moon was shining, and the roses were in pale
bloom. But she knew nobody, and wandered alone in the garden,
oppressed with something she did not understand. Every now and
then she came on a little group, or met a party of the guests, as
she walked, but none spoke to her, or seemed to see her, and she
spoke to none.

She found herself at length in an avenue of dark trees, the end
of which was far off. Thither she went walking, the only living
thing, crossing strange shadows from the moon. At the end of it
she was in a place of tombs. Terror and a dismay indescribable
seized her; she turned and fled back to the company of her kind.
But for a long time she sought the house in vain; she could not
reach it; the avenue seemed interminable to her feet returning.
At last she was again upon the lawn, but neither man nor woman
was there; and in the house only a light here and there was
burning. Every guest was gone. She entered, and the servants,
soft-footed and silent, were busy carrying away the vessels of
hospitality, and restoring order, as if already they prepared for
another company on the morrow. No one heeded her. She was out of
place, and much unwelcome. She hastened to the door of entrance,
for every moment there was a misery. She reached the hall. A
strange, shadowy porter opened to her, and she stepped out into a
wide street.

That, too, was silent. No carriage rolled along the center, no
footfarer walked on the side. Not a light shone from window or
door, save what they gave back of the yellow light of the moon.
She was lost--lost utterly, with an eternal loss. She knew
nothing of the place, had nowhere to go, nowhere she wanted to
go, had not a thought to tell her what question to ask, if she
met a living soul. But living soul there could be none to meet.
She had nor home, nor direction, nor desire; she knew of nothing
that she had lost, nor of anything she wished to gain; she had
nothing left but the sense that she was empty, that she needed
some goal, and had none. She sat down upon a stone between the
wide street and the wide pavement, and saw the moon shining gray
upon the stone houses. It was all deadness.

Presently, from somewhere in the moonlight, appeared, walking up
to her, where she sat in eternal listlessness, the one only
brother she had ever had. She had lost him years and years
before, and now she saw him; he was there, and she knew him. But
not a throb went through her heart. He came to her side, and she
gave him no greeting. "Why should I heed him?" she said to
herself. "He is dead. I am only in a dream. This is not he; it is
but his pitiful phantom that comes wandering hither--a ghost
without a heart, made out of the moonlight. It is nothing. I am
nothing. I am lost. Everything is an empty dream of loss. I know
it, and there is no waking. If there were, surely the sight of
him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a
thicker dream, and this is truer because more shadowy." And, the
form still standing by her, she felt it was ages away; she was
divided from it by a gulf of very nothingness. Her only life was,
that she was lost. Her whole consciousness was merest, all but
abstract, loss.

Then came the form of her mother, and bent over that of her
brother from behind. "Another ghost of a ghost! another shadow of
a phantom!" she said to herself. "She is nothing to me. If I
speak to her, she is not there. Shall I pour out my soul into the
ear of a mist, a fume from my own brain? Oh, cold creatures, ye
are not what ye seem, and I will none of you!"

With that, came her father, and stood beside the others, gazing
upon her with still, cold eyes, expressing only a pale quiet. She
bowed her face on her hands, and would not regard him. Even if he
were alive, her heart was past being moved. It was settled into
stone. The universe was sunk in one of the dreams that haunt the
sleep of death; and, if these were ghosts at all, they were
ghosts walking in their sleep.

But the dead, one of them seized one of her hands, and another
the other. They raised her to her feet, and led her along, and
her brother walked before. Thus was she borne away captive of her
dead, neither willing nor unwilling, of life and death equally
careless. Through the moonlight they led her from the city, and
over fields, and through valleys, and across rivers and seas--a
long journey; nor did she grow weary, for there was not life
enough in her to be made weary. The dead never spoke to her, and
she never spoke to them. Sometimes it seemed as if they spoke to
each other, but, if it were so, it concerned some shadowy matter,
no more to her than the talk of grasshoppers in the field, or of
beetles that weave their much-involved dances on the face of the
pool. Their voices were even too thin and remote to rouse her to
listen.

They came at length to a great mountain, and, as they were going
up the mountain, light began to grow, as if the sun were
beginning to rise. But she cared as little for the sun that was
to light the day as for the moon that had lighted the night, and
closed her eyes, that she might cover her soul with her eyelids.

Of a sudden a great splendor burst upon her, and through her
eyelids she was struck blind--blind with light and not with
darkness, for all was radiance about her. She was like a fish in
a sea of light. But she neither loved the light nor mourned the
shadow.

Then were her ears invaded with a confused murmur, as of the
mingling of all sweet sounds of the earth--of wind and water, of
bird and voice, of string and metal--all afar and indistinct.
Next arose about her a whispering, as of winged insects, talking
with human voices; but she listened to nothing, and heard nothing
of what was said: it was all a tiresome dream, out of which
whether she waked or died it mattered not.

Suddenly she was taken between two hands, and lifted, and seated
upon knees like a child, and she felt that some one was looking
at her. Then came a voice, one that she never heard before, yet
with which she was as familiar as with the sound of the blowing
wind. And the voice said, "Poor child! something has closed the
valve between her heart and mine." With that came a pang of
intense pain. But it was her own cry of speechless delight that
woke her from her dream.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE HUMAN SACRIFICE.


The same wind that rushed about the funeral of William Marston in
the old churchyard of Testbridge, howled in the roofless hall and
ruined tower of Durnmelling, and dashed against the plate-glass
windows of the dining-room, where the three ladies sat at lunch.
Immediately it was over, Lady Malice rose, saying:

"Hesper, I want a word with you. Come to my room."

Hesper obeyed, with calmness, but without a doubt that evil
awaited her there. To that room she had never been summoned for
anything she could call good. And indeed she knew well enough
what evil it was that to-day played the Minotaur. When they
reached the boudoir, rightly so called, for it was more in use
for _sulking_ than for anything else, Lady Margaret, with
back as straight as the door she had just closed, led the way to
the fire, and, seating herself, motioned Hesper to a chair.
Hesper again obeyed, looking as unconcerned as if she cared for
nothing in this world or in any other. Would we were all as
strong to suppress hate and fear and anxiety as some ladies are
to suppress all show of them! Such a woman looks to me like an
automaton, in which a human soul, somewhere concealed, tries to
play a good game of life, and makes a sad mess of it.

"Well, Hesper, what do you think?" said her mother, with a dull
attempt at gayety, which could nowise impose upon the experience
of her daughter.

"I think nothing, mamma," drawled Hesper.

"Mr. Redmain has come to the point at last, my dear child."

"What point, mamma?"

"He had a private interview with your father this morning."

"Indeed!"

"Foolish girl! you think to tease me by pretending indifference!"

"How can a fact be pretended, mamma? Why should I care what
passes in the study? I was never welcome there. But, if you wish,
I will pretend. What important matter was settled in the study
this morning?"

"Hesper, you provoke me with your affectation!"

Hesper's eyes began to flash. Otherwise she was still--silent--
not a feature moved. The eyes are more untamable than the tongue.
When the wild beast can not get out at the door, nothing can keep
him from the windows. The eyes flash when the will is yet lord
even of the lines of the mouth. Not a nerve of Hesper's quivered.
Though a mere child in the knowledge that concerned her own
being, even the knowledge of what is commonly called the heart,
she was yet a mistress of the art of self-defense, socially
applied, and she would not now put herself at the disadvantage of
taking anything for granted, or accept the clearest hint for a
plain statement. She not merely continued silent, but looked so
utterly void of interest, or desire to speak, that her mother,
recognizing her own child, and quailing before the evil spirit
she had herself sent on to the generations to come, yielded and
spoke out.

"Mr. Redmain has proposed for your hand, Hesper," she said, in a
tone as indifferent in her turn as if she were mentioning the
appointment of a new clergyman to the family living.

For one moment, and one only, the repose of Hesper's faultless
upper lip gave way; one writhing movement of scorn passed along
its curves, and left them for a moment straightened out--to
return presently to a grander bend than before. In a tone that
emulated, and more than equaled, the indifference of her
mother's, she answered:

"And papa?"

"Has referred him to you, of course," replied Lady Margaret.

"Meaning it?"

"What else? Why not? Is he not a _bon parli?_"

"Then papa did not mean it?" "I do not understand you,"
elaborated the mother, with a mingled yawn, which she was far
from attempting to suppress, seeing she simulated it.

"If Mr. Redmain is such a good match in papa's eyes," explained
Hesper, "why does papa refer him to me?"

"That you may accept him, of course."

"How much has the man promised to pay for me?"

"_Hesper!_"

"I beg your pardon, mamma. I thought you approved of calling
things by their right names!"

"No girl can do better than follow her mother's example," said
Lady Margaret, with vague sequence. "If _you_ do, Hesper,
you will accept Mr. Redmain."

Hesper fixed her eyes on her mother, but hers were too cold and
clear to quail before them, let them flash and burn as they
pleased.

"As you did papa?" said Hesper.

"As I did Mr. Mortimer."

"That explains a good deal, mamma."

"We are _your_ parents, anyhow, Hesper."

"I suppose so. I don't know which to be sorrier for--you or me.
Tell me, mamma: would _you_ marry Mr. Redmain?"

"That is a foolish question, and ought not to be put. It is one
which, as a married woman, I could not consider without
impropriety. Knowing the duty of a daughter, I did not put the
question to _you_. You are yourself the offspring of duty."

"If you were in my place, mamma," reattempted Hesper, but her
mother did not allow her to proceed.

"In any place, in every place, I should do my duty," she said.

It was not only born in Lady Malice's blood, but from earliest
years, had been impressed on her brain, that her first duty was
to her family, and mainly consisted in getting well out of its
way--in going peaceably through the fire to Moloch, that the rest
might have good places in the Temple of Mammon. In her turn, she
had trained her children to the bewildering conviction that it
was duty to do a certain wrong, if it should be required. That
wrong thing was now required of Hesper--a thing she scorned,
hated, shuddered at; she must follow the rest; her turn to be
sacrificed was come; she must henceforth be a living lie. She
could recompense herself as the daughters who have sinned by
yielding generally do when they are mothers, with the sin of
compelling, and thus make the trespass round and full. There is
in no language yet the word invented to fit the vileness of such
mothers; but, as time flows and speech grows, it may be found,
and, when it is found, it will have action retrospective. It is a
frightful thing when ignorance of evil, so much to be desired
where it can contribute to safety, is employed to smooth the way
to the unholiest doom, in which love itself must ruthlessly
perish, and those, who on the plea of virtue were kept ignorant,
be perfected in the image of the mothers who gave them over to
destruction. Some, doubtless, of the innocents thus immolated
pass even through hideous fires of marital foulness to come out
the purer and the sweeter; but whither must the stone about the
neck of those that cause the little ones to offend sink those
mothers? What company shall in the end be too low, too foul for
them? Like to like it must always be.

Hesper was not so ignorant as some girls; she had for some time
had one at her side capable of casting not a little light of the
kind that is darkness.

"_Duty_, mamma!" she cried, her eyes flaming, and her cheek
flushed with the shame of the thing that was but as yet the
merest object in her thought; "can a woman be born for such
things? How _could_ I--mamma, how could any woman, with an
atom of self-respect, consent to occupy the same--_room_
with Mr. Redmain?"

"Hesper! I am shocked. _Where_ did you learn to speak, not
to say _think_, of such things? Have I taken such pains--
good God! you strike me dumb! Have I watched my child like a
very--angel, as anxious to keep her mind pure as her body fair,
and is _this_ the result?" Upon what Lady Margaret founded
her claim to a result more satisfactory to her maternal designs,
it were hard to say. For one thing, she had known nothing of what
went on in her nursery, positively nothing of the real character
of the women to whom she gave the charge of it; and--although, I
dare say, for worldly women, Hesper's schoolmistresses were quite
respectable--what did her mother, what could she know of the
governesses or of the flock of sheep--all presumably, but how
certainly _all_ white?--into which she had sent her?

"Is _this_ the result?" said Lady Margaret.

"Was it your object, then, to keep me innocent, only that I might
have the necessary lessons in wickedness first from my husband?"
said Hesper, with a rudeness for which, if an apology be
necessary, I leave my reader to find it.

"Hesper, you are vulgar!" said Lady Margaret, with cold
indignation, and an expression of unfeigned disgust. She was,
indeed, genuinely shocked. That a young lady of Hesper's birth
and position should talk like this, actually objecting to a man
as her husband because she recoiled from his wickedness, of which
she was not to be supposed to know, or to be capable of
understanding, anything, was a thing unheard of in her world-a
thing unmaidenly in the extreme! What innocent girl would or
could or dared allude to such matters? She had no right to know
an atom about them!

"You are a married woman, mamma," returned Hesper, "and therefore
must know a great many things I neither know nor wish to know.
For anything I know, you may be ever so much a better woman than
I, for having learned not to mind things that are a horror to me.
But there was a time when you shrunk from them as I do now. I
appeal to you as a woman: for God's sake, save me from marrying
that wretch!"

She spoke in a tone inconsistently calm.

"Girl! is it possible you dare to call the man, whom your father
and I have chosen for your husband, a wretch!"

"Is he not a wretch, mamma?"

"If he were, how should I know it? What has any lady got to do
with a man's secrets?"

"Not if he wants to marry her daughter?"

"Certainly not. If he should not be altogether what he ought to
be--and which of us is?--then you will have the honor of
reclaiming him. But men settle down when they marry."

"And what comes of their wives?"

"What comes of women. You have your mother before you, Hesper."

"O mother!" cried Hesper, now at length losing the horrible
affectation of calm which she had been taught to regard as _de
rigueur_, "is it possible that you, so beautiful, so
dignified, would send me on to meet things you dare not tell me--
knowing they would turn me sick or mad? How dares a man like that
even desire in his heart to touch an innocent girl?"

"Because he is tired of the other sort," said Lady Malice, half
unconsciously, to herself. What she said to her daughter was ten
times worse: the one was merely a fact concerning Redmain; the
other revealed a horrible truth concerning herself. "He will
settle three thousand a year on you, Hesper," she said with a
sigh; "and you will find yourself mistress."

"I don't doubt it," answered Hesper, in bitter scorn. "Such a man
is incapable of making any woman a wife."

Hesper meant an awful spiritual fact, of which, with all her
ignorance of human nature, she had yet got a glimpse in her
tortured reflections of late; but her mother's familiarity with
evil misinterpreted her innocence, and caused herself utter
dismay. What right had a girl to think at all for herself in such
matters? Those were things that must be done, not thought of!

    "These things must not be thought
  After these ways; so, they will drive us mad."

Yes, these things are hard to think about--harder yet to write
about! The very persons who would send the white soul into arms
whose mere touch is a dishonor will be the first to cry out with
indignation against that writer as shameless who but utters the
truth concerning the things they mean and do; they fear lest
their innocent daughters, into whose hands his books might
chance, by ill luck, to fall, should learn that it is _their_
business to keep themselves pure.--Ah, sweet mothers! do
not be afraid. You have brought them up so carefully,
that they suspect you no more than they do the well-bred
gentlemen you would have them marry. And have they not your blood
in them? That will go far. Never heed the foolish puritan. Your
mothers succeeded with you: you will succeed with your daughters.

But it is a shame to speak of those things that are done of you
in secret, and I will forbear. Thank God, the day will come--it
may be thousands of years away--when there shall be no such
things for a man to think of, any more than for a girl to shudder
at! There is a purification in progress, and the kingdom of
heaven _will_ come, thanks to the Man who was holy,
harmless, undefined, and separate from sinners. You have heard a
little, probably only a little, about him at church sometimes.
But, when that day comes, what part will you have had in causing
evil to cease from the earth?

There had been a time in the mother's life when she herself
regarded her approaching marriage, with a man she did not love,
as a horror to which her natural maidenliness--a thing she could
not help--had to be compelled and subjected: of the true
maidenliness--that before which the angels make obeisance, and
the lion cowers--she never had had any; for that must be gained
by the pure will yielding itself to the power of the highest.
Hence she had not merely got used to the horror, but in a measure
satisfied with it; never suspecting, because never caring enough,
that she had at the same time, and that not very gradually, been
assimilating to the horror; had lost much of what purity she had
once had, and become herself unclean, body and mind, in the
contact with uncleanness. One thing she did know, and that
swallowed up all the rest--that her husband's affairs were so
involved as to threaten absolute poverty; and what woman of the
world would not count damnation better than that?--while Mr.
Redmain was rolling in money. Had she known everything bad of her
daughter's suitor, short of legal crime, for her this would have
covered it all.

In Hesper's useless explosion the mother did not fail to
recognize the presence of Sepia, without whose knowledge of the
bad side of the world, Hesper, she believed, could not have been
awake to so much. But she was afraid of Sepia. Besides, the thing
was so far done; and she did not think she would work to thwart
the marriage. On that point she would speak to her.

But it was a doubtful service that Sepia had rendered her cousin
--to rouse her indignation and not her strength; to wake horror
without hinting at remedy; to give knowledge of impending doom,
without poorest suggestion of hope, or vaguest shadow of possible
escape. It is one thing to see things as they are; to be consumed
with indignation at the wrong; to shiver with aversion to the
abominable; and quite another to rouse the will to confront the
devil, and resist him until he flee. For this the whole education
of Hesper had tended to unfit her. What she had been taught--and
that in a world rendered possible only by the self-denial of a
God--was to drift with the stream, denying herself only that
divine strength of honest love, which would soonest help her to
breast it.

For the earth, it is a blessed thing that those who arrogate to
themselves the holy name of society, and to whom so large a
portion of the foolish world willingly yields it, are in reality
so few and so ephemeral. Mere human froth are they, worked up by
the churning of the world-sea--rainbow-tinted froth, lovely
thinned water, weaker than the unstable itself out of which it is
blown. Great as their ordinance seems, it is evanescent as
arbitrary: the arbitrary is but the slavish puffed up--and is
gone with the hour. The life of the people is below; it ferments,
and the scum is for ever being skimmed off, and cast--God knows
where. All is scum where will is not. They leave behind them
influences indeed, but few that keep their vitality in shapes of
art or literature. There they go--little sparrows of the human
world, chattering eagerly, darting on every crumb and seed of
supposed advantage! while from behind the great dustman's cart,
the huge tiger-cat of an eternal law is creeping upon them. Is it
a spirit of insult that leads me to such a comparison? Where
human beings do not, will not _will_, let them be ladies
gracious as the graces, the comparison is to the disadvantage of
the sparrows. Not time, but experience will show that, although
indeed a simile, this is no hyperbole.

"I will leave your father to deal with you, Hesper," said her
mother, and rose.

Up to this point, Mortimer children had often resisted their
mother; beyond this point, never more than once.

"No, please, mamma!" returned Hesper, in a tone of expostulation.
"I have spoken my mind, but that is no treason. As my father has
referred Mr. Redmain to me, I would rather deal with him."

Lady Malice was herself afraid of her husband. There is many a
woman, otherwise courageous enough, who will rather endure the
worst and most degrading, than encounter articulate insult. The
mere lack of conscience gives the scoundrel advantage
incalculable over the honest man; the lack of refinement gives a
similar advantage to the cad over the gentleman; the combination
of the two lacks elevates the husband and father into an
autocrat. Hesper was not one her world would have counted weak;
she had physical courage enough; she rode well, and without fear;
she sat calm in the dentist's chair; she would have fought with
knife and pistol against violence to the death; and yet, rather
than encounter the brutality of an evil-begotten race
concentrated in her father, she would yield herself to a
defilement eternally more defiling than that she would both kill
and die to escape.

"Give me a few hours first, mamma," she begged. "Don't let him
come to me just yet. For all your hardness, you feel a little for
me--don't you?"

"Duty is always hard, my child," said Lady Margaret. She entirely
believed it, and looked on herself as a martyr, a pattern of
self-devotion and womanly virtue. But, had she been certain of
escaping discovery, she would have slipped the koh-i-noor into
her belt-pouch, notwithstanding. Never once in her life had she
done or abstained from doing a thing _because that thing was
right or was wrong. Such a person, be she as old and as hard as
the hills, is mere putty in the fingers of Beelzebub. Hesper rose
and went to her own room. There, for a long hour, she sat--with
the skin of her fair face drawn tight over muscles rigid as
marble--sat without moving, almost without thinking--in a mere
hell of disgusted anticipation. She neither stormed nor wept; her
life went smoldering on; she nerved herself to a brave endurance,
instead of a far braver resistance.

I fancy Hesper would have been a little shocked if one had called
her an atheist. She went to church most Sundays--when in the
country; for, in the opinion of Lady Margaret, it was not
decorous _there_ to omit the ceremony: where you have
influence you ought to set a good example--of hypocrisy, namely!
But, if any one had suggested to Hesper a certain old-fashioned
use of her chamber-door, she would have inwardly laughed at the
absurdity. But, then, you see, her chamber was no closet, but a
large and stately room; and, besides, how, alas! _could_ the
child of Roger and Lady M. Alice Mortimer know that in the
silence was hearing--that in the vacancy was a power waiting to
be sought? Hesper was not much alone, and here was a chance it
was a pity she should lose; but, when she came to herself with a
sigh, it was not to pray, and, when she rose, it was to ring the
bell.

A good many minutes passed before it was answered. She paced the
room--swiftly; she could sit, but she could not walk slowly. With
her hands to her head, she went sweeping up and down. Her maid's
knock arrested her before her toilet-table, with her back to the
door. In a voice of perfect composure, she desired the woman to
ask Miss Yolland to come to her.

Entering with a slight stoop from the waist, Sepia, with a long,
rapid, yet altogether graceful step, bore down upon Hesper like a
fast-sailing cutter over broad waves, relaxing her speed as she
approached her.

"Here I am, Hesper!" she said.

"Sepia," said Hesper, "I am sold."

Miss Yolland gave a little laugh, showing about the half of her
splendid teeth--a laugh to which Hesper was accustomed, but the
meaning of which she did not understand--nor would, without
learning a good deal that were better left unlearned. "To Mr.
Redmain, of course!" she said.

Hesper nodded.

"When are you going to be--"--she was about to say "cut up" but
there was a something occasionally visible in Hesper that now and
then checked one of her less graceful coarsenesses. "When is the
purchase to be completed?" she asked, instead.

"Good Heavens, Sepia! don't be so heartless!" cried Hesper.
"Things are not quite so bad as that! I am not yet in the hell of
knowing that. The day is not fixed for the great red dragon to
make a meal of me."

"I see you were not asleep in church, as I thought, all the time
of the sermon, last Sunday," said Sepia.

"I did my best, but I could not sleep: every time little Mowbray
mentioned the beast, I thought of Mr. Redmain; and it made me too
miserable to sleep."

"Poor Hesper!--Well! let us hope that, like the beast in the
fairy-tale, he will turn out a man after all."

"My heart will break," cried Hesper, throwing herself into a
chair. "Pity me, Sepia; _you_ love me a little."

A slight shadow darkened yet more Sepia's shadowy brow.

"Hesper," she said, gravely, "you never told me there was
anything of that sort! Who is it?"

"Mr. Redmain, of course!--I don't know what you mean, Sepia."

"You said your heart was breaking: who is it for?" asked Sepia,
almost imperiously, and raising her voice a little.

"Sepia!" cried Hesper, in bewilderment.

"Why should your heart be breaking, except you loved somebody?"

"Because I hate _him_," answered Hesper.

"Pooh! is that all?" returned Miss Yolland. "If there were
anybody you wanted--then I grant!"

"Sepia!" said Hesper, almost entreatingly, "I can not bear to be
teased to-day. Do be open with me. You always puzzle me so! I
don't understand you a bit better than the first day you came to
us. I have got used to you--that is all. Tell me--are you my
friend, or are you in league with mamma? I have my doubts. I
can't help it, Sepia."

She looked in her face pitifully. Miss Yolland looked at her
calmly, as if waiting for her to finish.

"I thought you would--not help me," Hesper went on, "--that no
one can except God--he could strike me dead; but I did think you
would feel for me a little. I hate Mr. Redmain, and I loathe
myself. If _you_ laugh at me, I shall take poison."

"I wouldn't do that," returned Miss Yolland, quite gravely, and
as if she had already contemplated the alternative; "--that is,
not so long as there was a turn of the game left."

"The game!" echoed Hesper. "--Playing for love with the devil!--I
wish the game were yours, as you call it!"

"Mine I'd make it, if I had it to play," returned Sepia. "I wish
I were the other player instead of you, but the man hates me.
Some men do.--Come," she went on, "I will be open with you,
Hesper; you don't hang for thoughts in England. I will tell you
what I would do with a man I hated--that is, if I was compelled
to marry him; it would hardly be fair otherwise, and I have a
weakness for fair play.--I would give him absolute fair play."

The last three words she spoke with a strange expression of
mingled scorn and jest, then paused, and seemed to have said all
she meant to say.

"Go on," sighed Hesper; "you amuse me." Her tone expressed
anything but amusement. "What would a woman of your experience do
in my place?"

Sepia fixed a momentary look on Hesper; the words seemed to have
stung her. She knew well enough that, if Lady Malice came to know
anything of her real history, she would have bare time to pack up
her small belongings. She wanted Hesper married, that she might
go with her into the world again; at the same time, she feared
her marriage with Mr. Redmain would hardly favor her wishes. But
she could not with prudence do anything expressly to prevent it;
while she might even please Mr. Redmain a little, if she were
supposed to have used influence on his side. That, however, must
not seem to Hesper. Sepia did not yet know in fact upon what
ground she had to build.

For some time she had been trying to get nearer to Hesper, but--
much like Hesper's experience with her--had found herself
strangely baffled, she could not tell how--the barrier being
simply the half innocence, half ignorance, of Hesper. When minds
are not the same, words do not convey between them.

She gave a ringing laugh, throwing back her head, and showing all
her fine teeth.

"You want to know what I would do with a man I hated, as you
_say_ you hate Mr. Redmain?--I would send for him at once--
not wait for him to come to me--and entreat him, _as he loved
me_, to deliver me from the dire necessity of obeying my
father. If he were a gentleman, as I hope he may be, he would
manage to get me out of it somehow, and wouldn't compromise me a
hair's breadth. But, that is, _if I were you_. If I were
_myself_ in your circumstances, and hated him as you do,
that would not serve my turn. I would ask him all the same to set
me free, but I would behave myself so that he could not do it.
While I begged him, I mean, I should make him feel that he could
not--should make him absolutely determined to marry me, at any
price to him, and at whatever cost to me. He should say to
himself that I did not mean what I said--as, indeed, for the sake
of my revenge, I should not. For that I would give anything--
supposing always, don't you know? that I hated him as you do Mr.
Redmain. He should declare to me it was impossible; that he would
die rather than give up the most precious desire of his life--and
all that rot, you know. I would tell him I hated him--only so
that he should not believe me. I would say to him, 'Release me,
Mr. Redmain, or I will make you repent it. I have given you fair
warning. I have told you I hated you.' He should persist, should
marry me, and then I _would_."

"Would what?"

"Do as I said."

"But what?"

"Make him repent it."

With the words, Miss Yolland broke into a second fit of laughter,
and, turning from Hesper, went, with a kind of loitering,
strolling pace toward the door, glancing round more than once,
each time with a fresh bubble rather than ripple in her laughter.
Whether it was all nonsensical merriment, or whether the author
of laughter without fun, Beelzebub himself, was at the moment
stirring in her, Hesper could not have told; as it was, she sat
staring after her, unable even to think. Just as she reached the
door, however, she turned quickly, and, with the smile of a
hearty, innocent child, or something very like it, ran back to
Hesper, threw her arms round her, and said:

"There, now! I've done for you what I could: I have made you
forget the odious man for a moment. I was curious to know whether
I could not make a bride forget her bridegroom. The other thing
is too easy."

"What other thing?"

"To make a bridegroom forget his bride, of course, you silly
child!--But there I am, off again! when really it is time to be
serious, and come to the only important point in the matter.--In
what shade of purity do you think of ascending the funeral pyre?
--In absolute white?--or rose-tinged?--or cream-colored!--or gold-
suspect?--Eh, happy bride?"

As she ceased, she turned her head away, pulled out her
handkerchief, and whimpered a little.

"Sepia!" said Hesper, annoyed, "you are a worse goose than I
thought you! What have _you_ got to cry about? _You_
have not got to marry him!"

"No; I wish I had!" returned Sepia, wiping her eyes. "Then I
shouldn't lose you. I should take care of that."

"And am I likely to gain such a friend in Mr. Redmain as to
afford the loss of the only _other_ friend I have?" said
Hesper, calmly.

"Ah, Hesper! a sad experience has taught me differently, The
moment you are married to the man--as married you will be--you
all are--bluster as you may--that moment you will begin to change
into a wife--a domesticated animal, that is--a tame tabby.
Unwilling a woman must be to confess herself only the better half
of a low-bred brute, with a high varnish--or not, as the case may
be; and there is nothing left her to do but set herself to find
out the wretch's virtues, or, as he hasn't got any, to invent for
him the least unlikely ones. She wants for her own sake to
believe in him, don't you know? Then she begins to repent having
said hard words of the poor gentleman. The next thing, of course,
will be, that you begin to hate the person, to whom you said
them, and to persuade yourself she drew them out of you; and so
you break off all communication with the obnoxious person; who
being, in the present instance, that black-faced sheep, Sepia
Yolland, she is very sorry beforehand, and hates Mr. Redmain with
all her heart; first, because Hesper Mortimer hates him, and
next, but twice as much, because she is going to love him. It is
a great pity _you_ should have him, Hesper. I wish you would
hand him over to me. _I_ shouldn't mind what he was. I
should soon tame him."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Hesper, with
righteous indignation. "_You would not mind what lie was!_"

Sepia laughed--this time her curious half-laugh.

"If I did, I wouldn't marry him, Hesper," she said. "Which is
worse--not to mind, and marry him; or to mind, and marry him all
the same? Eh, Cousin Hesper Mortimer?"

"I _can't_ make you out, Sepia!" said Hesper. "I believe I
never shall."

"Very likely. Give it up?"

"Quite."

"The best thing you could do. I can't always make myself out.
But, then, I always give it up directly, and so it does me no
harm. But it's ten times worse to worry your poor little heart to
rags about such a man as that; he's not worth a thought from a
grand creature like you. Where's the use, besides? Would you
stand staring at your medicine a whole day before the time for
taking it comes? I wouldn't have my right leg cut off because
that is the side my dog walks on, and dogs go mad! Slip, cup, and
lip--don't you know? The man may be underground long before the
wedding-day: he's anything but sound, they tell me. But it would
be far better soon after it, of course. Think only--a young
widow, rich, and not a straw the worse!"

"Sepia, I can't for the life of me tell whether you are a Job's
comforter or the devil's advocate."

"Not the latter, my child; for I want to see you emerge a saint
from the miseries of matrimony. But, whatever you do, Hesper,
don't break your heart, for you will find it hard to mend. I
broke mine once, and have been mad ever since."

"What is the use of saying that to me, when you know I have to
marry the man?"

"I never said you were not to marry him; I said you were not to
break your heart. Marriage is nothing so long as you do not make
a heart affair of it; that hurts; and, as you are not in love,
there is no occasion for it at all."

"Marriage is nothing, Sepia! Is it nothing to be tied to a man--
to _any_ man--for all your life?"

"That's as you take it. Nobody makes so much of it nowadays as
they used. The clergy themselves, who are at the bottom of all
the business, don't fuss about every trifle in the prayer-book.
They sign the articles, and have done with it--meaning, of
course, to break them, if they stand in their way."

Hesper rose in anger.

"How dare you--" she began.

"Good gracious!" cried Sepia, "you don't imagine I meant anything
so wicked! How could you let such a thing come into your head? I
declare you are quite dangerous to talk to!"

"It's such a horrible business," said Hesper, "it seems to make
one capable of anything wicked, only to think about it. I would
rather not say another word on the subject."

A shudder ran through her, as if at the sight of some hideously
offensive object.

"That would be the best thing," said Sepia, "if it meant not
think more about it. Everything is better for not being thought
about. I would do anything to comfort you, dear. I would marry
him for you, if that would do; but I fear it would scarcely meet
the views of Herr Papa. If I could please the beast as well--and
I think I should in time--I would willingly hand him the
purchase-money. But, of course, he would scorn to touch it,
except as the proceeds of the _bona-fide_ sale of his own
flesh and blood."




CHAPTER XIV.

UNGENEROUS BENEVOLENCE.


As the time went on, and Letty saw nothing more of Tom, she began
to revive a little, and feel as if she were growing safe again.
The tide of temptation was ebbing away; there would be no more
deceit; never again would she place herself in circumstances
whence might arise any necessity for concealment. She began, much
too soon, alas! to feel as if she were newborn; nothing worthy of
being called a new birth can take place anywhere but in the will,
and poor Letty's will was not yet old enough to give birth to
anything; it scarcely, indeed, existed. The past was rapidly
receding, that was all, and had begun to look dead, and as if it
wanted only to be buried out of her sight. For what is done is
done, in small faults as well as in murders; and, as nothing can
recall it, or make it not be, where can be the good in thinking
about it?--a reasoning worse than dangerous, before one has left
off being capable of the same thing over again. Still, in the
mere absence of renewed offense, it is well that some shadow of
peace should return; else how should men remember the face of
innocence? or how should they live long enough to learn to
repent? But for such breaks, would not some grow worse at full
gallop?

That the idea of Tom's friendship was very pleasant to her, who
can blame her? He had never said he loved her; he had only said
she was lovely: was she therefore bound to persuade herself he
meant nothing at all? Was it not as much as could be required of
her, that, in her modesty, she took him for no more than a true,
kind friend, who would gladly be of service to her? Ah! if Tom
had but been that! If he was not, he did not know it, which is
something to say both for and against him. It could not be other
than pleasant to Letty to have one, in her eyes so superior, who
would talk to her as an equal. It was not that ever she resented
being taught; but she did get tired of lessons only, beautiful as
they were. A kiss from Mrs. Wardour, or a little teasing from
Cousin Godfrey, would have done far more than all his
intellectual labor upon her to lift her feet above such snares as
she was now walking amid. She needed some play--a thing far more
important to life than a great deal of what is called business
and acquirement. Many a matter, over which grown people look
important, long-faced, and consequential, is folly, compared with
the merest child's frolic, in relation to the true affairs of
existence.

All the time, Letty had not in the least neglected her
houseduties; and, again, her readings with her cousin Godfrey,
since Tom's apparent recession, had begun to revive in interest.
He grew kinder and kinder to her, more and more fatherly.

But the mother, once disquieted, had lost no time in taking
measures. In every direction, secretly, through friends, she was
inquiring after some situation suitable for Letty: she owed it to
herself, she said, to find for the girl the right thing, before
sending her from the house. In the true spirit of benevolent
tyranny, she said not a word to Letty of her design. She had the
chronic distemper of concealment, where Letty had but a feverish
attack. Much false surmise might have been corrected, and much
evil avoided, had she put it in Letty's power to show how gladly
she would leave Thornwick. In the mean time the old lady kept her
lynx-eye upon the young people.

But Godfrey, having caught a certain expression in the said eye,
came to the resolution that thenceforth their schoolroom should
be the common sitting-room. This would aid him in carrying out
his resolve of a cautious and staid demeanor toward his pupil. To
preserve his freedom, he must keep himself thoroughly in hand.
Experience had taught him that, were he once to give way and show
his affection, there would from that moment be an end of teaching
and learning. And yet so much was he drawn to the girl, that, at
this very time, he gave her the manuscript of his own verses to
which I have referred--a volume exquisitely written, and
containing, certainly, the outcome of the best that was in him:
he did not tell her that he had copied them all with such care
and neatness, and had the book so lovelily bound, expressly and
only for her eyes..

News of something that seemed likely to suit her ideas for Letty
at length came to Mrs. Wardour's ears, whereupon she thought it
time to prepare the girl for the impending change. One day,
therefore, as she herself sat knitting one sock for Godfrey, and
Letty darning another, she opened the matter.

"I am getting old, Letty," she said, "and you can't be here
always. You are a thoughtless creature, but I suppose you have
the sense to see that?"

"Yes, indeed, aunt," answered Letty.

"It is high time you should be thinking," Mrs. Wardour went on,
"how you are to earn your bread. If you left it till I was gone,
you would find it very awkward, for you would have to leave
Thornwick at once, and I don't know who would take you while you
were looking out. I must see you comfortably settled before I
go."

"Yes, aunt."

"There are not many things you could do."

"No, aunt; very few. But I should make a better housemaid than
most--I do believe that."

"I am glad to find you willing to work; but we shall be able, I
trust, to do a little better for you than that. A situation as
housemaid would reflect little credit on my pains for you--would
hardly correspond to the education you have had."

Mrs. Wardour referred to the fact that Letty was for about a year
a day--boarder at a ladies' school in Testbridge, where no
immortal soul, save that of a genius, which can provide its own
sauce, could have taken the least interest in the chaff and
chopped straw that composed the provender.

"It is true," her aunt went on, "you might have made a good deal
more of it, if you had cared to do your best; but, such as you
are, I trust we shall find you a very tolerable situation as
governess."

At the word, Letty's heart ran half-way up her throat. A more
dreadful proposal she could not have imagined. She felt, and was,
utterly insufficient for--indeed, incapable of such an office.
She felt she knew nothing: how was she to teach anything? Her
heart seemed to grow gray within her. By nature, from lack of
variety of experience, yet more from daily repression of her
natural joyousness, she was exceptionally apprehensive where
anything was required of her. What she understood, she
encountered willingly and bravely; but, the simplest thing that
seemed to involve any element of obscurity, she dreaded like a
dragon in his den.

"You don't seem to relish the proposal, Letty," said Mrs.
Wardour. "I hope you had not taken it in your head that I meant
to leave you independent. What I have done for you, I have done
purely for your father's sake. I was under no obligation to take
the least trouble about you. But I have more regard to your
welfare than I fear you give me credit for."

"O aunt! it's only that I'm not fit for being a governess. I
shouldn't a bit mind being dairymaid or housemaid. I would go to
such a place to-morrow, if you liked."

"Letty, your tastes may be vulgar, but you owe it to your family
to look at least like a lady."

"But I am not scholar enough for a governess, aunt."

"That is not my fault. I sent you to a good school. Now, I will
find you a good situation, and you must contrive to keep it."

"O aunt! let me stay here--just as I am. Call me your dairymaid
or your housemaid. It is all one--I do the work now."

"Do you mean to reflect on me that I have required menial offices
of you? I have been to you in the place of a mother; and it is
for me, not for you, to make choice of your path in life."

"Do you want me to go at once?" asked Letty, her heart sinking
again, and her voice trembling with a pathos her aunt quite
misunderstood.

"As soon as I have secured for you a desirable situation--not
before," answered Mrs. Wardour, in a tone generously protective.

Her affection for the girl had never been deep; and, the moment
she fancied she and her son were drawing toward each other, she
became to her the thawed adder: she wished the adder well, but
was she bound to harbor it after it had begun to bite? There are
who never learn to see anything except in its relation to
themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves;
and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing
drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live--
thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and their
past experience, all the time as they go on withering.

But Mrs. Wardour was in some dread of what her son would say when
he came to know what she had been doing; for, when we are not at
ease with ourselves, when conscience keeps moving as if about to
speak, then we dread the disapproval of the lowliest, and Godfrey
was the only one before whom his mother felt any kind of awe.
Toward him, therefore, she kept silence for the present. If she
had spoken then, things might have gone very differently: it
might have brought Godfrey to the point of righteous resolve or
of passionate utterance. He could not well have opposed his
mother's design without going further and declaring that, if
Letty would, she should remain where she was, the mistress of the
house. If not the feeling of what was due to her, the dread of
the house without her might well have brought him to this.

Letty, for her part, believed her cousin Godfrey regarded her
with pity, and showed her kindness from a generous sense of duty;
she was a poor, dull creature for whom her cousin must do what he
could: one word of genuine love from him, one word even of such
love as was in him, would have caused her nature to shoot
heavenward and spread out earthward with a rapidity that would
have astonished him; she would thereby have come into her
spiritual property at once, and heaven would have opened to her--
a little way at least--probably to close again for a time. Now
she felt crushed. The idea of undertaking that for which she knew
herself so ill fitted was not merely odious but frightful to her.
She was ready enough to work, but it must be real, not sham work.
She must see and consult Mary! This was quite another affair from
Tom! She would take the first opportunity. In the mean time there
was nothing to be done or said; and with a heavy heart she held
her peace--only longed for her own room, that she might have a
cry. To her comfort the clock struck ten, and all that now lay
between her and that refuge was the usual round of the house with
Mrs. Wardour, to see all safe for the night. That done, they
parted, and Letty went slowly and sadly up the stair. It was a
dark prospect before her. At best, she had to leave the only home
she remembered, and go among strangers.




CHAPTER XV.

THE MOONLIGHT.


It was a still, frosty night, with a full moon. When she reached
her chamber, Letty walked mechanically to the window, and there
stood, with the candle in her hand, looking carelessly out, nor
taking any pleasure in the great night. The window looked on an
open, grassy yard, where were a few large ricks of wheat, shining
yellow in the cold, far-off moon. Between the moon and the earth
hung a faint mist, which the thin clouds of her breath seemed to
mingle with and augment. There lay her life--out of doors--dank
and dull; all the summer faded from it--all its atmosphere a
growing fog! She would never see Tom again! It was six weeks
since she saw him last! He must have ceased to think of her by
this time! And, if he did think of her again, she would be far
off, nobody knew where.

Something struck the window with a slight, sharp clang. It was
winter, and there were no moths or other insects flying, What
could it be? She put her face close to the pane, and looked out.
There was a man in the shadow of one of the ricks! He had his hat
off, and was beckoning to her. It could be nobody but Tom! The
thought sent to her heart a pang of mingled pleasure and pain.
Clearly he wanted to speak to her! How gladly she would! but then
would come again all the trouble of conscious deceit: how was she
to bear that all over again! Still, if she was going to be turned
out of the house so soon, what would it matter? If her aunt was
going to compel her to be her own mistress, where was the harm if
she began it a few days sooner? What did it matter anyhow what
she did? But she dared not speak to him! Mrs. Wardour's ears were
as sharp as her eyes. The very sound of her own voice in the
moonlight would terrify her. She opened the lattice softly, and
gently shaking her head--she dared not shake it vigorously--was
on the point of closing it again, when, making frantic signs of
entreaty, the man stepped into the moonlight, and it was plainly
Tom. It was too dreadful! He might be seen any moment! She shook
her head again, in a way she meant, and he understood, to mean
she dared not. He fell on his knees and laid his hands together
like one praying. Her heart interpreted the gesture as indicating
that he was in trouble, and that, therefore, he begged her to go
to him. With sudden resolve she nodded acquiescence, and left the
window.

Her room was in a little wing, projecting from the back of the
house, over the kitchen. The servants' rooms were in another
part, but Letty forgot a tiny window in one of them, which looked
also upon the ricks. There was a back stair to the kitchen, and
in the kitchen a door to the farm-yard. She stole down the stair,
and opened the door with absolute noiselessness. In a moment more
she had stolen on tiptoe round the corner, and was creeping like
a ghost among the ricks. Not even a rustle betrayed her as she
came up to Tom from behind. He still knelt where she had left
him, looking up to her window, which gleamed like a dead eye in
the moonlight. She stood for a moment, afraid to move, lest she
should startle him, and he should call out, for the slightest
noise about the place would bring Godfrey down. The next moment,
however, Tom, aware of her presence, sprang to his feet, and,
turning, bounded to her, and took her in his arms. Still
possessed by the one terror of making a noise, she did not object
even by a contrary motion, and, when he took her hand to lead her
away out of sight of the house, she yielded at once.

When they were safe in the field behind the hedge--

"Why did you make me come down, Tom?" she whispered, half choked
with fear, looking up in his face, which was radiant in the
moonshine.

"Because I could not bear it one day longer," he answered. "All
this time I have been breaking my heart to get a word with you,
and never seeing you except at church, and there you would never
even look at me. It is cruel of you, Letty. I know you could
manage it, if you liked, well enough. Why should you try me so?"

"Do speak a little lower, Tom: sound goes so far at night!--I
didn't know you would want to see me like that," she answered,
looking up in his face with a pleased smile.

"Didn't know!" repeated Tom. "I want nothing else, think of
nothing else, dream of nothing else. Oh, the delight of having
you here all alone to myself at last! You darling Letty!"

"But I must go directly, Tom. I have no business to be out of the
house at this time of the night. If you hadn't made me think you
were in some trouble, I daredn't have come."

"And ain't I in trouble enough--trouble that nothing but your
coming could get me out of? To love your very shadow, and not be
able to get a peep even of that, except in church, where all the
time of the service I'm raging inside like a wild beast in a
cage--ain't that trouble enough to make you come to me?"

Letty's heart leaped up. He loved her, then! Love, real love, was
what it meant! It was paradise! Anything might come that would!
She would be afraid of nothing any more. They might say or do to
her what they pleased--she did not care a straw, if he loved her
--really loved her! And he did! he did! She was going to have him
all to her own self, and nobody was to have any right to meddle
with her more!

"I didn't know you loved me, Tom!" she said, simply, with a
little gasp.

"And I don't know yet whether you love me," returned Tom.

"Of course, if you love _me_," answered Letty, as if
everybody must give back love for love.

Tom took her again in his arms, and Letty was in greater bliss
than she had ever dreamed possible. From being a nobody in the
world, she might now queen it to the top of her modest bent; from
being looked down on by everybody, she had the whole earth under
her feet; from being utterly friendless, she had the heart of Tom
Helmer for her own! Yet even then, eluding the barriers of Tom's
arms, shot to her heart, sharp as an arrow, the thought that she
was forsaking Cousin Godfrey. She did not attempt to explain it
to herself; she was in too great confusion, even if she had been
capable of the necessary analysis. It came, probably, of what her
aunt had told her concerning her cousin's opinion of Tom. Often
and often since, she had said to herself that, of course, Cousin
Godfrey was mistaken and quite wrong in not liking Tom; she was
sure he would like him if he knew him as she did!--and yet to act
against his opinion, and that never uttered to herself, cost her
this sharp pang, and not a few that followed! To soften it for
the moment, however, came the vaguely, sadly reproachful feeling,
that, seeing they were about to send her out into the world to
earn her bread, they had no more any right to make such demands
upon her loyalty to them as should exclude the closest and only
satisfying friend she had--one who would not turn her away, but
wanted to have her for ever. That Godfrey knew nothing of his
mother's design, she did not once suspect.

"Now, Tom, you have seen me, and spoken to me, and I must go,"
said Letty.

"O Letty!" cried Tom, reproachfully, "now when we understand each
other? Would you leave me in the very moment of my supremest
bliss? That would be mockery, Letty! That is the way my dreams
serve me always. But, surely, you are no dream! Perhaps I
_am_ dreaming, and shall wake to find myself alone! I never
was so happy in my life, and you want to leave me all alone in
the midnight, with the moon to comfort me! Do as you like,
Letty!--I won't leave the place till the morning. I will go back
to the rick-yard, and lie under your window all night."

The idea of Tom, out on the cold ground, while she was warm in
bed, was too much for Letty's childish heart. Had she known Tom
better, she would not have been afraid: she would have known that
he would indeed do as he had said--so far; that he would lie down
under her window, and there remain, even to the very moment when
he began to feel miserable, and a moment longer, but not more
than two; that then he would get up, and, with a last look, start
home for bed.

"I will stop a little while, Tom," she offered, "if you will
promise to go home as soon as I leave you."

Tom promised.

They went wandering along the farm-lanes, and Tom made love to
her, as the phrase is--in his case, alas! a phrase only too
correct. I do not say, or wish understood, that he did not love
her--with such love as lay in the immediate power of his
development; but, being a sort of a poet, such as a man may be
who loves the form of beauty, but not the indwelling power of it,
that is, the truth, he _made_ love to her--fashioned forms
of love, and offered them to her; and she accepted them, and
found the words of them very dear and very lovely. For neither
had she got far enough, with all Godfrey's endeavors for her
development, to love aright the ring of the true gold, and
therefore was not able to distinguish the dull sound of the gilt
brass Tom offered her. Poor fellow! it was all he had. But
compassion itself can hardly urge that as a reason for accepting
it for genuine. What rubbish most girls will take for poetry, and
with it heap up impassably their door to the garden of delights!
what French polish they will take for refinement! what merest
French gallantry for love! what French sentiment for passion!
what commonest passion they will take for devotion!--passion that
has little to do with their beauty even, still less with the
individuality of it, and nothing at all with their loveliness!

In justice to Tom, I must add, however, that he also took not a
little rubbish for poetry, much sentiment for pathos, and all
passion for love. He was no intentional deceiver; he was so self-
deceived, that, being himself a deception, he could be nothing
but a deceiver--at once the most complete and the most
pardonable, and perhaps the most dangerous of deceivers.

With all his fine talk of love, to which he now gave full flow,
it was characteristic of him that, although he saw Letty without
hat or cloak, just because he was himself warmly clad, he never
thought of her being cold, until the arm he had thrown round her
waist felt her shiver. Thereupon he was kind, and would have
insisted that she should go in and get a shawl, had she not
positively refused to go in and come out again. Then he would
have had her put on his coat, that she might be able to stay a
little longer; but she prevailed on him to let her go. He brought
her to the nearest point not within sight of any of the windows,
and, there leaving her, set out at a rapid pace for the inn where
he had put up his mare.

When Tom was gone, and the bare night, a diffused conscience, all
about her, Letty, with a strange fear at her heart, like one in a
churchyard, with the ghost-hour at hand, and feeling like "a
guilty thing surprised," although she had done nothing wrong in
its mere self, stole back to the door of the kitchen, longing for
the shelter of her own room, as never exile for his fatherland.

She had left the door an inch ajar, that she might run the less
risk of making a noise in opening it; but ere she reached it, the
moon shining full upon it, she saw plainly, and her heart turned
sick when she saw, that it was closed. Between cold and terror
she shuddered from head to foot, and stood staring.

Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have
blown it to. If so, there was much danger that the noise had been
heard; but, in any case, there was no time to lose. She glided
swiftly to it. She lifted the latch softly--but, horror of
horrors! in vain. The door was locked. She was shut out. She must
lie or confess! And what lie would serve? Poor Letty! And yet,
for all her dismay, her terror, her despair that night, in her
innocence, she never once thought of the worst danger in which
she stood!

The least perilous, where no safe way was left, would now have
been to let the simple truth appear; Letty ought immediately to
have knocked at the door, and, should that have proved
unavailing, to have broken her aunt's window even, to gain
hearing and admittance. But that was just the kind of action of
which, truthful as was her nature, poor Letty, both by
constitution and training, was incapable; human opposition,
superior anger, condemnation, she dared not encounter. She sank,
more than half fainting, upon the door-step.

The moment she came to herself, apprehension changed into active
dread, rushed into uncontrollable terror. She sprang to her feet,
and, the worst thing she could do, fled like the wind after Tom--
now, indeed, she imagined, her only refuge! She knew where he had
put up his horse, and knew he could hardly take any other way
than the foot-path to Testbridge. He could not be more than a few
yards ahead of her, she thought. Presently she heard him
whistling, she was sure, as he walked leisurely along, but she
could not see him. The way was mostly between hedges until it
reached the common: there she would catch sight of him, for,
notwithstanding the gauzy mist, the moon gave plenty of light. On
she went swiftly, still fancying at intervals she heard in front
of her his whistle, and even his step on the hard, frozen path.
In her eager anxiety to overtake him, she felt neither the
chilling air nor the fear of the night and the loneliness. Dismay
was behind her, and hope before her. On and on she ran. But when,
with now failing breath, she reached the common, and saw it lie
so bare and wide in the moonlight, with the little hut standing
on its edge, like a ghastly lodge to nowhere, with gaping black
holes for door and window, then, indeed, the horror of her
deserted condition and the terrors of the night began to crush
their way into her soul. What might not be lurking in that ruin,
ready to wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing
girl, start out in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now
streamed behind her! And there was the hawthorn, so old and
grotesquely contorted, always bringing to her mind a frightful
German print at the head of a poem called "The Haunted Heath," in
one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It was like an old miser,
decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run! Miserable as was
her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable by these
terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which the
moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a
shippen, and a certain strange sound, coming again and again,
which she could not account for, all turned to things unnatural,
therefore frightful. Faintly, once or twice, she tried to
persuade herself that it was only a horrible dream, from which
she would wake in safety; but it would not do; it was, alas! all
too real--hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or fact, there was no
turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful than all
possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old house
she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room
inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon!
Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into
the shadow of the hedges.

There seems to be a hope as well as a courage born of despair:
immortal, yet inconstant children of a death-doomed sire, both
were now departing. If Tom had come this way, she must, she
thought, have overtaken him long before now! But, perhaps, she
had fainted outright, and lain longer than she knew at the
kitchen-door; and when she started to follow him, Tom was already
at home! Alas, alas! she was lost utterly!

The footpath came to an end, and she was on the high-road. There
was the inn where Tom generally put up! It was silent as the
grave. The clang of a horseshoe striking a stone came through the
frosty air from far along the road. Her heart sank into the
depths of the infinite sea that encircles the soul, and, for the
second time that night, Death passing by gave her an alms of
comfort, and she lay insensible on the border of the same highway
along which Tom, on his bay mare, went singing home.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE MORNING.


At Thornwick, Tom had been descried in the yard, by the spying
organs of one of the servants--a woman not very young, and not
altogether innocent of nightly interviews. Through the small
window of her closet she had seen, and having seen she watched--
not without hope she might be herself the object of the male
presence, which she recognized as that of Tom Helmer, whom almost
everybody knew. In a few minutes, however, Letty appeared behind
him, and therewith a throb of evil joy shot through her bosom:
what a chance! what a good joke! what a thing for her to find out
Miss Letty; to surprise her naughty secret! to have her in her
power! She would have no choice but tell her everything--and then
what privileges would be hers! and what larks they two would have
together, helping each other! She had not a thought of betraying
her: there would be no fun in that! not the less would she
encourage a little the fear that she might, for it would be as a
charm in her bosom to work her will withal!--To make sure of
Letty and her secret, partly also in pure delight of mischief,
and enjoyment of the power to tease, she stole down stairs, and
locked the kitchen door--the bolt of which, for reasons of her
own, she kept well oiled; then sat down in an old rocking-chair,
and waited--I can not say watched, for she fell fast asleep.
Letty lifted the latch almost too softly for her to have heard
had she been awake; but on the door-step Letty, had she been
capable of listening, might have heard her snoring.

When the young woman awoke in the cold gray of the morning, and
came to herself, compunction seized her. Opening the door softly,
she went out and searched everywhere; then, having discovered no
trace of Letty, left the door unlocked, and went to bed, hoping
she might yet find her way into the house before Mrs. Wardour was
down.

When that lady awoke at the usual hour, and heard no sound of
stir, she put on her dressing-gown, and went, in the anger of a
housekeeper, to Letty's room: there, to her amazement and horror,
she saw the bed had lain all the night expectant. She hurried
thence to the room occupied by the girl who was the cause of the
mischief. Roused suddenly by the voice of her mistress, she got
up half awake, and sleepy-headed; and, assailed by a torrent of
questions, answered so, in her confusion, as to give the
initiative to others: before she was well awake, she had told all
she had seen from the window, but nothing of what she had herself
done. Mrs. Wardour hurried to the kitchen, found the door on the
latch, believed everything and much more, went straight to her
son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his
unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein
floated side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she
could bring the lips of propriety to utter. Before he quite came
to himself the news had well-nigh driven him mad. There stood his
mother, dashing her cold hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the
girl he loved, whom he had gone to bed believing the sweetest
creature in creation, and loving himself more than she dared
show! He had been dreaming of her with the utmost tenderness,
when his mother woke him with the news that she had gone in the
night with Tom Helmer, the poorest creature in the neighborhood.

"For God's sake, mother," he cried, "go away, and let me get up!"

"What can you do, Godfrey? What is there to be done? Let the jade
go to her ruin!" cried Mrs. Wardour, alarmed in the midst of her
wrath. "You _can_ do nothing now. As she has made her bed,
so she must lie."

Her words were torture to him. He sprang from his bed, and
proceeded to pull on his clothes. Terrified at the wildness of
his looks, his mother fled from the room, but only to watch at
the door.

Scarcely could Godfrey dress himself for agitation; brain and
heart seemed to mingle in chaotic confusion. Anger strove with
unbelief, and indignation at his mother with the sense of bitter
wrong from Letty. It was all incredible and shameful, yet not the
less utterly miserable. The girl whose Idea lay in the innermost
chamber of his heart like the sleeping beauty in her palace!
while he loved and ministered to her outward dream-shape which
flitted before the eyes of his sense, in the hope that at last
the Idea would awake, and come forth and inform it!--he dared not
follow the thought! it was madness and suicide! He had been
silently worshiping an angel with wings not yet matured to the
spreading of themselves to the winds of truth; those wings were a
little maimed, and he had been tending them with precious balms,
and odors, and ointments: all at once she had turned into a bat,
a skin-winged creature that flies by night, and had disappeared
in the darkness! Of all possible mockeries, for _her_ to
steal out at night to the embraces of a fool! a wretched, weak-
headed, idle fellow, whom every clown called by his Christian
name! an ass that did nothing but ride the country on a horse too
good for him, and quarrel with his mother from Sunday to
Saturday! For such a man she had left him, Godfrey Wardour! a man
who would have lifted her to the height of her nature! whereas
the fool Helmer would sink her to the depth of his own merest
nothingness! The thing was inconceivable! yet it was! He knew it;
they were all the same! Never woman worthy of true man! The
poorest show would take them captive, would draw them from
reason!

He knew _now_ that he loved the girl. Gnashing his teeth
with fellest rage, he caught from the wall his heaviest hunting-
whip, rushed heedless past his mother where she waited on the
landing, and out of the house.

In common with many, he thought worse of Tom Helmer than he yet
deserved. He was a characterless fool, a trifler, a poetic
babbler, a good-for-nothing good sort of fellow; that was the
worst that as yet was true of him; and better things might with
equal truth have been said of him, had there been any one that
loved him enough to know them.

Godfrey ran to the stable, and to the stall of his fastest horse.
As he threw the saddle over his back, he almost wept in the midst
of his passion at the sight of the bright stirrups. His hands
trembled so that he failed repeatedly in passing the straps
through the buckles of the girths. But the moment he felt the
horse under him, he was stronger, set his head straight for the
village of Warrender, where Tom's mother lived, and went away
over everything. His crow-flight led him across the back of the
house of Durnmelling. Hesper, who had not slept well, and found
the early morning even a worse time to live in than the evening,
saw him from her window, going straight as an arrow. The sight
arrested her. She called Sepia, who for a few nights had slept in
her room, to the window.

"There, now!" she said, "there is a man who looks a man! Good
Heavens! how recklessly he rides! I don't believe Mr. Redmain
could keep on a horse's back if he tried!" Sepia looked, half
asleep. Her eyes grew wider. Her sleepiness vanished.

"Something is wrong with the proud yeoman!" she said. "He is
either mad or in love, probably both! We shall hear more of this
morning's ride, Hesper, as I hope to die a maid!--That's a man I
should like to know now," she added, carelessly. "There is some
go in him! I have a weakness for the kind of man that
_could_ shake the life out of me if I offended him."

"Are you so anxious, then, to make a good, submissive wife?" said
Hesper.

"I should take the very first opportunity of offending him--
mortally, as they call it. It would be worth one's while with a
man like that."

"Why? How? For what good?"

"Just to see him look. There is nothing on earth so scrumptious
as having a grand burst of passion all to yourself." She drew in
her breath like one in pain. "My God!" she said, "to see it come
and go! the white and the red! the tugging at the hair! the tears
and the oaths, and the cries and the curses! To know that you
have the man's heart-strings stretched on your violin, and that
with one dash of your bow, one tiniest twist of a peg, you can
make him shriek!"

"Sepia!" said Hesper, "I think Darwin must be right, and some of
us at least are come from--"

"Tiger-cats? or perhaps the Tasmanian devil?" suggested Sepia,
with one of her scornful half-laughs.

But the same instant she turned white as death, and sat softly
down on the nearest chair.

"Good Heavens, Sepia! what is the matter? I did not mean it,"
said Hesper, remorsefully, thinking she had wounded her, and that
she had broken down in the attempt to conceal the pain.

"It's not that, Hesper, dear. Nothing you could say would hurt
me," replied Sepia, drawing breath sharply. "It's a pain that
comes sometimes--a sort of picture drawn in pains--something I
saw once."

"A picture?"

"Oh! well!--picture, or what you will!--Where's the difference,
once it's gone and done with? Yet it will get the better of me
now and then for a moment! Some day, when you are married, and a
little more used to men and their ways, I will tell you. My
little cousin is much too innocent now."

"But you have not been married, Sepia! What should you know about
disgraceful things?"

"I will tell you when you are married, and not until then,
Hesper. There's a bribe to make you a good child, and do as you
must--that is, as your father and mother and Mr. Redmain would
have you!"

While they talked, Godfrey, now seen, now vanishing, had become a
speck in the distance. Crossing a wide field, he was now no
longer to be distinguished from the grazing cattle, and so was
lost to the eyes of the ladies.

By this time he had collected his thoughts a little, and it had
grown plain to him that the last and only thing left for him to
do for Letty was to compel Tom to marry her at once. "My mother
will then have half her own way!" he said to himself bitterly.
But, instead of reproaching himself that he had not drawn the
poor girl's heart to his own, and saved her by letting her know
that he loved her, he tried to congratulate himself on the pride
and self-important delay which had preserved him from yielding
his love to one who counted herself of so little value. He did
not reflect that, if the value a woman places upon herself be the
true estimate of her worth, the world is tolerably provided with
utterly inestimable treasures of womankind; yet is it the meek
who shall inherit it; and they who make least of themselves are
those who shall be led up to the dais at last.

"But the wretch shall marry her at once!" he swore. "Her
character is nothing now but a withered flower in the hands of
that woman. Even were she capable of holding her tongue, by this
time a score must have seen them together."

Godfrey hardly knew what he was to gain by riding to Warrender,
for how could he expect to find Tom there? and what could any one
do with the mother? Only, where else could he go first to learn
anything about him? Some hint he might there get, suggesting in
what direction to seek them. And he must be doing something,
however useless: inaction at such a moment would be hell itself!

Arrived at the house--a well-appointed cottage, with out-houses
larger than itself--he gave his horse to a boy to lead up and
down, while he went through the gate and rang the bell in a porch
covered with ivy. The old woman who opened the door said Master
Tom was not up yet, but she would take his message. Returning
presently, she asked him to walk in. He declined the hospitality,
and remained in front of the house.

Tom was no coward, in the ordinary sense of the word: there was
in him a good deal of what goes to the making of a gentleman; but
he confessed to being "in a bit of a funk" when he heard who was
below: there was but one thing it could mean, he thought--that
Letty had been found out, and here was her cousin come to make a
row. But what did it matter, so long as Letty was true to him?
The world should know that Wardour nor Platt--his mother's maiden
name!--nor any power on earth should keep from him the woman of
his choice! As soon as he was of age, he would marry her, in
spite of them all. But he could not help being a little afraid of
Godfrey Wardour, for he admired him.

For Godfrey, he would have rather liked Tom Helmer, had he ever
seen down into the best of him; but Tom's carelessness had so
often misrepresented him, that Godfrey had too huge a contempt
for him. And now the miserable creature had not merely grown
dangerous, but had of a sudden done him the greatest possible
hurt! It was all Godfrey could do to keep his contempt and hate
within what he would have called the bounds of reason, as he
waited for "the miserable mongrel." He kept walking up and down
the little lawn, which a high shrubbery protected from the road,
making a futile attempt, as often as he thought of the policy of
it, to look unconcerned, and the next moment striking fierce,
objectless blows with his whip. Catching sight of him from a
window on the stair, Tom was so little reassured by his demeanor,
that, crossing the hall, he chose from the stand a thick oak
stick--poor odds against a hunting-whip in the hands of one like
Godfrey, with the steel of ten years of manhood in him.

Tom's long legs came doubling carelessly down the two steps from
the door, as, with a gracious wave of the hand, and swinging his
cudgel as if he were just going out for a stroll, he coolly
greeted his visitor. But the other, instead of returning the
salutation, stepped quickly up to him.

"Mr. Helmer, where is Miss Lovel?" he said, in a low voice.

Tom turned pale, for a pang of undefined fear shot through him,
and his voice betrayed genuine anxiety as he answered:

"I do not know. What has happened?"

Wardour's fingers gripped convulsively his whip-handle, and the
word _liar_ had almost escaped his lips; but, through the
darkness of the tempest raging in him, he yes read truth in Tom's
scared face and trembling words.

"You were with her last night," he said, grinding it out between
his teeth.

"I was," answered Tom, looking more scared still.

"Where is she now?" demanded Godfrey again.

"I hope to God you know," answered Tom, "for I don't."

"Where did you leave her?" asked Wardour, in the tone of an
avenger rather than a judge.

Tom, without a moment's hesitation, described the place with
precision--a spot not more than a hundred yards from the house.

"What right had you to come sneaking about the place?" hissed
Godfrey, a vain attempt to master an involuntary movement of the
muscles of his face at once clinching and showing his teeth. At
the same moment he raised his whip unconsciously.

Tom instinctively stepped back, and raised his stick in attitude
of defense. Godfrey burst into a scornful laugh.

"You fool!" he said; "you need not be afraid; I can see you are
speaking the truth. You dare not tell me a lie!"

"It is enough," returned Tom with dignity, "that I do not tell
lies. I am not afraid of you, Mr. Wardour. What I dare or dare
not do, is neither for you nor me to say. You are the older and
stronger and every way better man, but that gives you no right to
bully me."

This answer brought Godfrey to a better sense of what became
himself, if not of what Helmer could claim of him. Using positive
violence over himself, he spoke next in a tone calm even to
iciness.

"Mr. Helmer," he said, "I will gladly address you as a gentleman,
if you will show me how it can be the part of a gentleman to go
prowling about his neighbor's property after nightfall."

"Love acknowledges no law but itself, Mr. Wardour," answered Tom,
inspired by the dignity of his honest affection for Letty. "Miss
Lovel is not your property. I love her, and she loves me. I would
do my best to see her, if Thornwick were the castle of Giant
Blunderbore."

"Why not walk up to the house, like a man, in the daylight, and
say you wanted to see her?"

"Should I have been welcome, Mr. Wardour?" said Tom,
significantly. "You know very well what my reception would have
been; and I know better than throw difficulties in my own path.
To do as you say would have been to make it next to impossible to
see her."

"Well, we must find her now anyhow; and you must marry her off-
hand."

"Must!" echoed Tom, his eyes flashing, at once with anger at the
word and with pleasure at the proposal. "Must?" he repeated,
"when there is nothing in the world I desire or care for but to
marry her? Tell me what it all means, Mr. Wardour; for, by
Heaven! I am utterly in the dark."

"It means just this--and I don't know but I am making a fool of
myself to tell you--that the girl was seen in your company late
last night, and has been neither seen nor heard of since."

"My God!" cried Tom, now first laying hold of the fact; and with
the word he turned and started for the stable. His run, however,
broke down, and with a look of scared bewilderment he came back
to Godfrey.

"Mr. Wardour," he said, "what am I to do? Please advise me. If we
raise a hue and cry, it will set people saying all manner of
things, pleasant neither for you nor for us."

"That is your business, Mr. Helmer," answered Godfrey, bitterly.
"It is you who have brought this shame on her."

"You are a cold-hearted man," said Tom. "But there is no shame in
the matter. I will soon make that clear--if only I knew where to
go after her. The thing is to me utterly mysterious: there are
neither robbers nor wild beasts about Thornwick. What _can_
have happened to her?"

He turned his back on Godfrey for a moment, then, suddenly
wheeling, broke out:

"I will tell you what it is; I see it all now; she found out that
she had been seen, and was too terrified to go into the house
again!--Mr. Wardour," he continued, with a new look in his eyes,
"I have more reason to be suspicious of you and your mother than
you have to suspect me. Your treatment of Letty has not been of
the kindest."

So Letty had been accusing him of unkindness! Ready as he now was
to hear anything to her disadvantage, it was yet a fresh stab to
the heart of him. Was this the girl for whom, in all honesty and
affection, he had sought to do so much! How could she say he was
unkind to her?--and say it to a fellow like this? It was
humiliating, indeed! But he would not defend himself. Not to Tom,
not to his mother, not to any living soul, would he utter a word
even resembling blame of the girl! He, at least, would carry
himself generously! Everything, though she had plunged his heart
in a pitcher of gall, should be done for her sake! She should go
to her lover, and leave blame behind her with him! His sole care
should be that the wind-bag should not collapse and slip out of
it, that he should actually marry her; and, as soon as he had
handed him over to her in safety, he would have done with her and
with all women for ever, except his mother! Not once more would
he speak to one of them in tone of friendship!

He looked at Tom full in the eyes, and made him no answer.

"If I don't find Letty this very morning," said Tom, "I shall
apply for a warrant to search your house: my uncle Rendall will
give me one."

Godfrey smiled a smile of scorn, turned from him as a wise man
turns from a fool, and went out of the gate.

He had just taken his horse from the boy and sent him off, when
he saw a young woman coming hurriedly across the road, from the
direction of Testbridge. Plainly she was on business of pressing
import. She came nearer, and he saw it was Mary Marston. The
moment she recognized Godfrey, she began to run to him; but, when
she came near enough to take notice of his mien, as he stood with
his foot in the stirrup, with no word of greeting or look of
reception, and inquiry only in every feature, her haste suddenly
dropped, her flushed face turned pale, and she stood still,
panting. Not a word could she utter, and was but just able to
force a faint smile, with intent to reassure him.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE RESULT.


Letty would never perhaps have come to herself in the cold of
this world, under the shifting tent of the winter night, but for
an outcast mongrel dog, which, wandering masterless and hungry,
but not selfish, along the road, came upon her where she lay
seemingly lifeless, and, recognizing with pity his neighbor in
misfortune, began at once to give her--it was all he had that was
separable--what help and healing might lie in a warm, honest
tongue. Diligently he set himself to lick her face and hands.

By slow degrees her misery returned, and she sat up. Rejoiced at
his success, the dog kept dodging about her, catching a lick here
and a lick there, wherever he saw a spot of bare within his
reach. By slow degrees, next, the knowledge of herself joined on
to the knowledge of her misery, and she knew who it was that was
miserable. She threw her arms round the dog, laid her head on
his, and wept. This relieved her a little: weeping is good, even
to such as Alberigo in an ice-pot of hell. But she was cold to
the very marrow, almost too cold to feel it; and, when she rose,
could scarcely put one foot before the other.

Not once, for all her misery, did she imagine a return to
Thornwick. Without a thought of whither, she moved on, unaware
even that it was in the direction of the town. The dog, delighted
to believe that he had raised up to himself a mistress, followed
humbly at her heel: but always when she stopped, as she did every
few paces, ran round in front of her, and looked up in her face,
as much as to say, "Here I am, mistress! shall I lick again?" If
a dog could create, he would make masters and mistresses. Gladly
would she then have fondled him, but feared the venture; for, it
seemed, were she to stoop, she must fall flat on the road, and
never rise more.

Slowly the two went on, with motion scarce enough to keep the
blood moving in their veins. Had she not been, for all her late
depression, in fine health and strength, Letty could hardly have
escaped death from the cold of that night. For many months after,
some portion of every night she passed in dreaming over again
this dreariest wandering; and in her after life people would be
puzzled to think why Mrs. Helmer looked so angry when any one
spoke as if the animals died outright. But, although she never
forgot this part of the terrible night, she never dreamed of any
rescue from it; memory could not join it on to the next part, for
again she lost consciousness, and could recall nothing between
feeling the dog once more licking her face and finding herself in
bed.

When Beenie opened her kitchen-door in the morning to let in the
fresh air, she found seated on the step, and leaning against the
wall, what she took first for a young woman asleep, and then for
the dead body of one; for, when she gave her a little shake, she
fell sideways off the door-step. Beenie's heart smote her; for
during the last hours of her morning's sleep she had been
disturbed by the howling of a dog, apparently in their own yard,
but had paid no further attention to it than that of repeated
mental objurgation: there stood the offender, looking up at her
pitifully--ugly, disreputable, of breed unknown, one of the
_canaille!_ When the girl fell down, he darted at her,
licked her cold face for a moment, then stretching out a long,
gaunt neck, uttered from the depth of his hidebound frame the
most melancholy appeal, not to Beenie, at whom he would not even
look again, but to the open door. But, when Beenie, in whom, as
in most of us, curiosity had the start of service, stooped, and,
peering more closely into the face of the girl, recognized,
though uncertainly, a known face, she too uttered a kind of howl,
and straightway raising Letty's head drew her into the house. It
is the mark of an imperfect humanity, that personal knowledge
should spur the sides of hospitable intent: what difference does
our knowing or not knowing make to the fact of human need? The
good Samaritan would never have been mentioned by the mouth of
the True, had he been even an old acquaintance of the "certain
man." But it is thus we learn; and, from loving this one and
that, we come to love all at last, and then is our humanity
complete.

Letty moved not one frozen muscle, and Beenie, growing terrified,
flew up the stair to her mistress. Mary sprang from her bed and
hurried down. There, on the kitchen-floor, in front of the yet
fireless grate, lay the body of Letty Lovel. A hideous dog was
sitting on his haunches at her head. The moment she entered,
again the animal stretched out a long, bony neck, and sent forth
a howl that rang penetrative through the house. It sounded in
Mary's ears like the cry of the whole animal creation over the
absence of their Maker. They raised her and carried her to Mary's
room. There they laid her in the still warm bed, and proceeded to
use all possible means for the restoration of heat and the
renewal of circulation.

Here I am sorry to have to mention that Beenie, returning,
unsuccessful, from their first efforts, to the kitchen, to get
hot water, and finding the dog sitting there motionless, with his
face turned toward the door by which they had carried Letty out,
peevish with disappointment and dread, drove him from the
kitchen, and from the court, into the street where that same day
he was seen wildly running with a pan at his tail, and the next
was found lying dead in a bit of waste ground among stones and
shards. God rest all such!

But, as far as Letty was concerned, happily Beenie was not an old
woman for nothing. With a woman's sympathy, Mary hesitated to run
for the doctor: who could tell what might be involved in so
strange an event? If they could but bring her to, first, and
learn something to guide them! She pushed delay to the very verge
of danger. But, soon after, thanks to Beenie's persistence,
indications of success appeared, and Letty began to breathe. It
was then resolved between the nurses that, for the present, they
would keep the affair to themselves, a conclusion affording much
satisfaction to Beenie, in the consciousness that therein she had
the better of the Turnbulls, against whom she cherished an ever-
renewed indignation.

But, when Mary set herself at length to find out from Letty what
had happened, without which she could not tell what to do next,
she found her mind so far gone that she understood nothing said
to her, or, at least, could return no rational response, although
occasionally an individual word would seem to influence the
current of her ideas. She kept murmuring almost inarticulately;
but, to Mary's uneasiness, every now and then plainly uttered the
name _Tom_. What was she to make of it? In terror lest she
should betray her, she must yet do something. Matters could not
have gone wrong so far that nothing could be done to set them at
least a little straight! If only she knew what! A single false
step might do no end of mischief! She must see Tom Helmer:
without betraying Letty, she might get from him some
enlightenment. She knew his open nature, had a better opinion of
him than many had, and was a little nearer the right of him. The
doctor must be called; but she would, if possible, see Tom first.

It was not more than half an hour's walk to Warrender, and she
set out in haste. She must get back before George Turnbull came
to open the shop.

When she got near enough to see Mr. Wardour's face, she read in
it at once that he was there from the same cause as herself; but
there was no good omen to be drawn from its expression: she read
there not only keen anxiety and bitter disappointment, but
lowering anger; nor was that absent which she felt to be distrust
of herself. The sole acknowledgment he made of her approach was
to withdraw his foot from the stirrup and stand waiting.

"You know something," he said, looking cold and hard in her face.

"About what?" returned Mary, recovering herself; she was careful,
for Letty's sake, to feel her way.

"I hope to goodness," returned Godfrey, almost fiercely, yet with
a dash of rude indifference, "_you_ are not concerned in
this--business!"--he was about to use a bad adjective, but
suppressed it.

"I _am_ concerned in it," said Mary, with perfect quietness.

"You knew what was going on?" cried Wardour. "You knew that
fellow there came prowling about Thornwick like a fox about a
hen-roost? By Heaven! if I had but suspected it--"

"No, Mr. Wardour," interrupted Mary, already catching a glimpse
of light, "I knew nothing of that."

"Then what do you mean by saying you are concerned in the
matter?"

Mary thought he was behaving so unlike himself that a shock might
be of service.

"Only this," she answered, "--that Letty is now lying in my room,
whether dead or alive I am in doubt. She must have spent the
night in the open air--and that without cloak or bonnet."

"Good God!" cried Godfrey. "And you could leave her like that!"

"She is attended to," replied Mary, with dignity. "There are
worse evils to be warded than death, else I should not be here;
there are hard judgments and evil tongues.--Will you come and see
her, Mr. Wardour?"

"No," answered Godfrey, gruffly.

"Shall I send a note to Mrs. Wardour, then?"

"I will tell her myself."

"What would you have me do about her?"

"I have no concern in the matter, but I suppose you had better
send for a doctor. Talk to that fellow there," he added, pointing
with his whip toward the cottage, and again putting his foot in
the stirrup. "Tell him he has brought her to disgrace--"

"I don't believe it," interrupted Mary, her face flushing with
indignant shame. But Godfrey went on without heeding her:

"And get him to marry her off-hand, if you can--for, by God! he
_shall_ marry her, or I will kill him."

He spoke looking round at her over his shoulder, a scowl on his
face, his foot in the stirrup, one hand twisted in the mane of
his horse, and the other with the whip stretched out as if
threatening the universe. Mary stood white but calm, and made no
answer. He swung himself into the saddle, and rode away. She
turned to the gate.

From behind the shrubbery, Tom had heard all that passed between
them, and, meeting her as she entered, led the way to a side-
walk, unseen from the house.

"O Miss Marston! what is to be done?" he said. "This is a
terrible business! But I am so glad you have got her, poor girl!
I heard all you said to that brute, Wardour. Thank you, thank you
a thousand times, for taking her part. Indeed, you spoke but the
truth for her. Let me tell you all I know."

He had not much to tell, however, beyond what Mary knew already.

"She keeps calling out for you, Mr. Helmer," she said, when he
had ended.

"I will go with you. Come, come," he answered.

"You will leave a message for your mother?"

"Never mind my mother. She's good at finding out for herself."

"She ought to be told," said Mary; "but I can't stop to argue it
with you. Certainly your first duty is to Letty now. Oh, if
people only wouldn't hide things!"

"Come along," cried Tom, hurrying before her; "I will soon set
everything right."

"How shall we manage with the doctor?" said Mary, as they went.
"We can not do without him, for I am sure she is in danger."

"Oh, no!" said Tom. "She will be all right when she sees me. But
we will take the doctor on our way, and prepare him."

When they came to the doctor's house, Mary walked on, and Tom
told the doctor he had met Miss Marston on her way to him, and
had come instead: she wanted to let him know that Miss Lovel had
come to her quite unexpected that morning; that she was
delirious, and had apparently wandered from home under an attack
of brain-fever, or something of the sort.




CHAPTER XVIII.

MARY AND GODFREY.


Everything went very tolerably, so far as concerned the world of
talk, in the matter of Letty's misfortunes. Rumors, it is true--
and more than one of them strange enough--did for a time go
floating about the country; but none of them came to the ears of
Tom or of Mary, and Letty was safe from hearing anything; and the
engagement between her and Tom soon became generally known.

Mrs. Helmer was very angry, and did all she could to make Tom
break it off--it was so much below him! But in nothing could the
folly of the woman have been more apparent than in her fancying,
with the experience of her life before her, that any opposition
of hers could be effectual otherwise than to the confirmation of
her son's will. So short-sighted was she as to originate most of
the reports to Letty's disadvantage; but Tom's behavior, on the
other hand, was strong to put them down; for the man is seldom
found so faithful where such reports are facts.

Mrs. Wardour took care to say nothing unkind of Letty. She was of
her own family; and, besides, not only was Tom a better match
than she could have expected for her, but she was more than
satisfied to have Godfrey's dangerous toy thus drawn away beyond
his reach. As soon as ever the doctor gave his permission, she
went to see her; but, although, dismayed at sight of her
suffering face, she did not utter one unkind word, her visit was
so plainly injurious in its effects, that it was long before Mary
would consent to a repetition of it.

Letty's recovery was very slow. The spring was close at hand
before the bloom began to reappear--and then it was but fitfully
--in Letty's cheek. Neither her gayety nor her usual excess of
timorousness returned. A certain sad seriousness had taken the
place of both, and she seemed to look out from deeper eyes. I can
not think that Letty had begun to perceive that there actually is
a Nature shaping us to its own ends; but I think she had begun to
feel that Mary lived in the conscious presence of such a power.
To Tom she behaved very sweetly, but more like a tender sister
than a lover, and Mary began to doubt whether her heart was
altogether Tom's. From mention of approaching marriage, she
turned with a nervous, uneasy haste. Had the insight which the
enforced calmness of suffering sometimes brings opened her eyes
to anything in Tom? The doubt filled Mary with anxiety. She
thought and thought, until--delicate matter as it was to meddle
with, and small encouragement as Godfrey Wardour had given her to
expect sympathy--she yet made up her mind to speak to him on the
subject--and the rather that she was troubled at the unworthiness
of his behavior to Letty: gladly would she have him treat her
with the generosity essential to the idea she had formed of him.

She went, therefore, one Sunday evening, to Thornwick, and
requested to see Mr. Wardour.

It was plainly an unwilling interview he granted her, but she was
not thereby deterred from opening her mind to him.

"I fear, Mr. Wardour," she said, "--I come altogether without
authority--but I fear Letty has been rather hurried in her
engagement with Mr. Helmer. I think she dreads being married--at
least so soon."

"You would have her break it off?" said Godfrey, with cold
restraint.

"No; certainly not," replied Mary; "that would be unjust to Mr.
Helmer. But the thing was so hastened, indeed, hurried, by that
unhappy accident, that she had scarcely time to know her own
mind."

"Miss Marston," answered Godfrey, severely, "it is her own fault
--all and entirely her own fault."

"But, surely," said Mary, "it will not do for us to insist upon
desert. That is not how we are treated ourselves."

"Is it not?" returned Godfrey, angrily. "My experience is
different. I am sure my faults have come back upon me pretty
sharply.--She _must_ marry the fellow, or her character is
gone."

"I am unwilling to grant that, Mr. Wardour. It was wrong in her
to have anything to say to Mr. Helmer without your knowledge, and
a foolish thing to meet him as she did; but Letty is a good girl,
and you know country ways are old-fashioned, and in itself there
is nothing wicked in having a talk with a young man after dark."

"You speak, I dare say, as such things arc regarded in--certain
strata of society," returned Godfrey, coldly; "but such views do
not hold in that to which either of them belongs."

"It seems to me a pity they should not, then," said Mary. "I know
nothing of such matters, but, surely, young people should have
opportunities of understanding each other. Anyhow, marriage is a
heavy penalty to pay for such an indiscretion. A girl might like
a young man well enough to enjoy a talk with him now and then,
and yet find it hard to marry him."

"Did you come here to dispute social customs with me, Miss
Marston?" said Godfrey. "I am not prepared, nor, indeed,
sufficiently interested, to discuss them with you."

"I will come to the point at once," answered Mary; who, although
speaking so collectedly, was much frightened at her own boldness:
Godfrey seemed from his knowledge so far above her, and she owed
him so much.--Would it not be possible for Letty to return
here? Then the thing might take its natural course, and Tom and
she know each other better that he did not hear the remarks which
rose like the dust of his passage behind him. In the same little
sitting-room, where for so many years Mary had listened to the
slow, tender wisdom of her father, a clever young man was now
making love to an ignorant girl, whom he did not half understand
or half appreciate, all the time he feeling himself the greater
and wiser and more valuable of the two. He was unaware, however,
that he did feel so, for he had never yet become conscious of any
_fact_ concerning himself.

The whole Turnbull family, from the beginnings of things self-
constituted judges of the two Marstons, were not the less
critical of the daughter, that the father had been taken from
her. There was grumbling in the shop every time she ran up to see
Letty, every one regarding her and speaking of her as a servant
neglecting her duty. Yet all knew well enough that she was co-
proprietor of business and stock, and the elder Turnbull knew
besides that, if the lawyer to whose care William Marston had
committed his daughter were at that moment to go into the affairs
of the partnership, he would find that Mary had a much larger
amount of money actually in the business than he.

Of all matters connected with the business, except those of her
own department, Mary was ignorant. Her father had never neglected
his duty, but he had so far neglected what the world calls a
man's interests as to leave his affairs much too exclusively in
the hands of his partner; he had been too much interested in life
itself to look sharply after anything less than life. He
acknowledged no _worldly_ interests at all: either God cared
for his interests or he himself did not. Whether he might not
have been more attentive to the state of his affairs without
danger of deeper loss, I do not care to examine or determine; the
result of his life in the world was a grand success. Now, Mary's
feeling and judgment in regard to _things_ being identical
with her father's, Turnbull, instructed by his greed, both
natural and acquired, argued thus--unconsciously almost, but not
the less argued--that what Mary valued so little, and he valued
so much, must, by necessary deduction, be more his than hers--and
_logically_ ought to be _legally_. So servants begin to
steal, arguing that such and such things are only lying about,
and nobody cares for them.

But Turnbull, knowing that, notwithstanding the reason on his
side, it was not safe to act on such a conclusion, had for some
time felt no little anxiety to secure himself from investigation
and possible disaster by the marriage of Mary to his son George.

Tom Helmer had now to learn that, by his father's will, made
doubtless under the influence of his mother, he was to have but a
small annuity so long as she lived. Upon this he determined
nevertheless to marry, confident in his literary faculty, which,
he never doubted, would soon raise it to a very sufficient
income. Nor did Mary attempt to dissuade him; for what could be
better for a disposition like his than care for the things of
this life, occasioned by the needs of others dependent upon him!
Besides, there seemed to be nothing else now possible for Letty.
So, in the early summer, they were married, no relative present
except Mrs. Wardour, Mrs. Helmer and Godfrey having both declined
their invitation; and no friend, except Mary for bridesmaid, and
Mr. Pycroft, a school and college friend of Tom's, who was now
making a bohemian livelihood in London by writing for the weekly
press, as he called certain journals of no high standing, for
groom's man. After the ceremony, and a breakfast provided by
Mary, the young couple took the train for London.




CHAPTER XIX.

MARY IN THE SHOP.


More than a year had now passed from the opening of my narrative.
It was full summer again at Testbridge, and things, to the
careless eye, were unchanged, and, to the careless mind, would
never change, although, in fact, nothing was the same, and
nothing could continue as it now was. For were not the earth and
the sun a little colder? Had not the moon crumbled a little? And
had not the eternal warmth, unperceived save of a few, drawn a
little nearer--the clock that measures the eternal day ticked one
tick more to the hour when the Son of Man will come? But the
greed and the fawning did go on unchanged, save it were for the
worse, in the shop of Turnbull and Marston, seasoned only with
the heavenly salt of Mary's good ministration.

She was very lonely. Letty was gone; and the link between Mr.
Wardour and her not only broken, but a gulf of separation in its
place. Not the less remained the good he had given her. No good
is ever lost. The heavenly porter was departed, but had left the
door wide. She had seen him but once since Letty's marriage, and
then his salutation was like that of a dead man in a dream; for
in his sore heart he still imagined her the confidante of Letty's
deception.

But the shadow of her father's absence swallowed all the other
shadows. The air of warmth and peace and conscious safety which
had hitherto surrounded her was gone, and in its place cold,
exposure, and annoyance. Between them her father and she had
originated a mutually protective atmosphere of love; when that
failed, the atmosphere of earthly relation rushed in and
enveloped her. The moment of her father's departure, malign
influences, inimical to the very springs of her life,
concentrated themselves upon her: it was the design of John
Turnbull that she should not be comfortable so long as she did
not irrevocably cast in her lot with his family; and, the rest in
the shop being mostly creatures of his own choice, by a sort of
implicit understanding they proceeded to make her uncomfortable.
So long as they confined themselves to silence, neglect, and
general exclusion, Mary heeded little their behavior, for no
intercourse with them, beyond that of external good offices,
could be better than indifferent to her; but, when they advanced
to positive interference, her position became indeed hard to
endure. They would, for instance, keep watch on her serving, and,
as soon as the customer was gone, would find open fault with this
or that she had said or done. But even this was comparatively
endurable: when they advanced to the insolence of doing the same
in the presence of the customer, she found it more than she could
bear with even a show of equanimity. She did her best, however;
and for some time things went on without any symptom of
approaching crisis. But it was impossible this should continue;
for, had she been capable of endless endurance, her persecutors
would only have gone on to worse. But Mary was naturally quick-
tempered, and the chief trouble they caused her was the control
of her temper; for, although she had early come to recognize the
imperative duty of this branch of self-government, she was not
yet perfect in it. Not every one who can serve unboundedly can
endure patiently; and the more gentle some natures, the more they
resent the rudeness which springs from an opposite nature;
absolutely courteous, they flame at discourtesy, and thus lack of
the perfection to which patience would and must raise them. When
Turnbull, in the narrow space behind the counter, would push his
way past her without other pretense of apology than something
like a sneer, she did feel for a moment as if evil were about to
have the victory over her; and when Mrs. Turnbull came in, which
happily was but seldom, she felt as if from some sepulchre in her
mind a very demon sprang to meet her. For she behaved to her
worst of all. She would heave herself in with the air and look of
a vulgar duchess; for, from the height of her small
consciousness, she looked down upon the shop, and never entered
it save as a customer. The daughter of a small country attorney,
who, notwithstanding his unneglected opportunities, had not been
too successful to accept as a husband for his daughter such a
tradesman as John Turnbull, she arrogated position from her idea
of her father's position; and, while bitterly cherishing the
feeling that she had married beneath her, obstinately excluded
the fact that therein she had descended to her husband's level,
regarding herself much in the light of a princess whose disguise
takes nothing from her rank. She was like those ladies who,
having set their seal to the death of their first husbands by
marrying again, yet cling to the title they gave them, and
continue to call themselves by their name.

Mrs. Turnbull never bought a dress at the shop. No one should say
of her, it was easy for a snail to live in a castle! before they
did what was irrevocable. They are little better than children
now."

"The thing is absolutely impossible," said Godfrey, and haughtily
rose from his chair like one in authority ending an interview.
"But," he added, "you have been put to great expense for the
foolish girl, and, when she leaves you, I desire you will let me
know--"

"Thank you, Mr. Wardour!" said Mary, who had risen also. "As you
have now given a turn to the conversation which is not in the
least interesting to me, I wish you a good evening."

With the words, she left the room. He had made her angry at last.
She trembled so that, the instant she was out of sight of the
house, she had to sit down for dread of falling.

Godfrey remained in the room where she left him, full of
indignation. Ever since that frightful waking, he had brooded
over the injury--the insult, he counted it--which Letty had
heaped upon him. A great tenderness toward her, to himself
unknown, and of his own will unbegotten, remained in his spirit.
When he passed the door of her room, returning from that terrible
ride, he locked it, and put the key in his pocket, and from that
day no one entered the chamber. But, had he loved Letty as purely
as he had loved her selfishly, he would have listened to Mary
pleading in her behalf, and would have thought first about her
well-being, not about her character in the eyes of the world. He
would have seen also that, while the breath of the world's
opinion is a mockery in counterpoise with a life of broken
interest and the society of an unworthy husband, the mere fact of
his mother's receiving her again at Thornwick would of itself be
enough to reestablish her position in the face of all gainsayers.
But in Godfrey Wardour love and pride went hand in hand. Not for
a moment would he will to love a girl capable of being
interested, if nothing more, in Tom Helmer. It must be allowed,
however, that it would have been a terrible torture to see Letty
about the place, to pass her on the stair, to come upon her in
the garden, to sit with her in the room, and know all the time
that it was the test of Tom's worth and her constancy. Even were
she to give up Tom, satisfied that she did not love him, she
could be nothing more to him, even in the relation in which he
had allowed her to think she stood to him. She had behaved too
deceitfully, too heartlessly, too ungratefully, too
_vulgarly_ for that! Yet was his heart torn every time the
vision of the gentle girl rose before "that inward eye," which,
for long, could no more be to him "the bliss of solitude"; when
he saw those hazel depths looking half anxious, half sorrowful in
his face, as, with sadly comic sense of her stupidity, she
listened while he explained or read something he loved. But no;
nothing else would do than act the mere honest guardian,
compelling them to marry, no matter how slight or transient the
shadow the man had cast over her reputation!

Mary returned with a sense of utter failure.

But before long she came to the conclusion that all was right
between Tom and Letty, and that the cause of her anxiety had lain
merely in Letty's loss of animal spirits.

Now and then Mary tried to turn Tom's attention a little toward
the duty of religion: Tom received the attempt with gentle
amusement and a little _badinage_. It was all very well for
girls! Indeed, he had made the observation that girls who had no
religion were "strong-minded," and that he could not endure! Like
most men, he was so well satisfied with himself, that he saw no
occasion to take trouble to be anything better than he was. Never
suspecting what a noble creature he was meant to be, he never saw
what a poor creature he was. In his own eyes he was a man any
girl might be proud to marry. He had not yet, however, sunk to
the depth of those who, having caught a glimpse of nobility,
confess wretchedness, excuse it, and decline to allow that the
noble they see they are bound to be; or, worse still, perhaps,
admit the obligation, but move no inch to fulfill it. It seems to
me that such must one day make acquaintance with _essential_
misery--a thing of which they have no conception.

Day after day Tom passed through Turnbull and Marston's shop to
see Letty. Tom cared for nobody, else he would have gone in by
the kitchen-door, which was the only other entrance to the house;
but I do not know whether it is a pity or not she took pains to
let her precious public know that she went to London to make her
purchases. If she did not mention also that she made them at the
warehouses where her husband was a customer, procuring them at
the same price he would have paid, it was because she saw no
occasion. It was indeed only for some small occasional necessity
she ever crossed the threshold of the place whence came all the
money she had to spend. When she did, she entered it with such
airs as she imagined to represent the consciousness of the scion
of a county family: there is one show of breeding vulgarity
seldom assumes--simplicity. No sign of recognition would pass
between her husband and herself: by one stern refusal to
acknowledge his advances, she had from the first taught him that
in the shop they were strangers: he saw the rock of ridicule
ahead, and required no second lesson: when she was present, he
never knew it. George had learned the lesson before he went into
the business, and Mary had never required it. The others behaved
to her as to any customer known to stand upon her dignity, but
she made them no return in politeness; and the way she would
order Mary, now there was no father to offend, would have been
amusing enough but for the irritation its extreme rudeness caused
her. She did, however, manage sometimes to be at once both a
little angry and much amused. Small idea had Mrs. Turnbull of the
diversion which on such occasions she afforded the customers
present.

One day, a short time before her marriage, delayed by the illness
of Mr. Redmain, Miss Mortimer happened to be in the shop, and was
being served by Mary, when Mrs. Turnbull entered. Careless of the
customer, she walked straight up to her as if she saw none, and
in a tone that would be dignified, and was haughty, desired her
to bring her a reel of marking-cotton. Now it had been a
principle with Mary's father, and she had thoroughly learned it,
that whatever would be counted a rudeness by _any_ customer,
must be shown to _none_. "If all are equal in the sight of
God," he would say, "how dare I leave a poor woman to serve a
rich? Would I leave one countess to serve another? My business is
to sell in the name of Christ. To respect persons in the shop
would be just the same as to do it in the chapel, and would be to
deny him."

"Excuse me, ma'am," said Mary, "I am waiting on Miss Mortimer,"
and went on with what she was about. Mrs. Turnbull flounced away,
a little abashed, not by Mary, but by finding who the customer
was, and carried her commands across the shop. After a moment or
two, however, imagining, in the blindness of her surging anger,
that Miss Mortimer was gone, whereas she had only moved a little
farther on to look at something, she walked up to Mary in a fury.

"Miss Marston," she said, her voice half choked with rage, "I am
at a loss to understand what you mean by your impertinence."

"I am sorry you should think me impertinent," answered Mary. "You
saw yourself I was engaged with a customer, and could not attend
to you."

"Your tone was insufferable, miss!" cried the grand lady; but
what more she would have said I can not tell, for just then Miss
Mortimer resumed her place in front of Mary. She had no idea of
her position in the shop, neither suspected who her assailant
was, and, fearing the woman's accusation might do her an injury,
felt compelled to interfere.

"Miss Marston," she said--she had just heard Mrs. Turnbull use
her name--"if you should be called to account by your employer,
will you, please, refer to me? You were perfectly civil both to
me and to this--" she hesitated a perceptible moment, but ended
with the word "_lady_," peculiarly toned.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Mary, with a smile, "but it is of no
consequence."

This answer would have almost driven the woman out of her reason
--already, between annoyance with herself and anger with Mary, her
hue was purple: something she called her constitution required a
nightly glass of brandy-and-water--but she was so dumfounded by
Miss Mortimer's defense of Mary, which she looked upon as an
assault on herself, so painfully aware that all hands were
arrested and all eyes fixed on herself, and so mortified with the
conviction that her husband was enjoying her discomfiture, that,
with what haughtiness she could extemporize from consuming
offense, she made a sudden vertical gyration, and walked from the
vile place.

Now, George never lost a chance of recommending himself to Mary
by siding with her--but only after the battle. He came up to her
now with a mean, unpleasant look, intended to represent sympathy,
and, approaching his face to hers, said, confidentially:

"What made my mother speak to you like that, Mary?"

"You must ask herself," she answered.

"There you are, as usual, Mary!" he protested; "you will never
let a fellow take your part!"

"If you wanted to take my part, you should have done so when
there would have been some good in it."

"How could I, before Miss Mortimer, you know!"

"Then why do it now?"

"Well, you see--it's hard to bear hearing you ill used! What did
you say to Miss Mortimer that angered my mother?"

His father heard him, and, taking the cue, called out in the
rudest fashion:

"If you think, Mary, you're going to take liberties with
customers because you've got no one over you, the sooner you find
you're mistaken the better."

Mary made him no answer.

On her way to "the villa," Mrs. Turnbull, spurred by spite, had
got hold of the same idea as George, only that she invented where
he had but imagined it; and when her husband came home in the
evening fell out upon him for allowing Mary to be impertinent to
his customers, in whom for the first time she condescended to
show an interest:

"There she was, talking away to that Miss Mortimer as if she was
Beenie in the kitchen! County people won't stand being treated as
if one was just as good as another, I can tell you! She'll be the
ruin of the business, with her fine-lady-airs! Who's she, I
should like to know?"

"I shall speak to her," said the husband. "But," he went on, "I
fear you will no longer approve of marrying her to George, if you
think she's an injury to the business!"

"You know, as well as I do, that is the readiest way to get her
out of it. Make her marry George, and she will fall into my
hands. If I don't make her repent her impudence then, you may
call me the fool you think me."

Mary knew well enough what they wanted of her; but of the real
cause at the root of their desire she had no suspicion. Recoiling
altogether from Mr. Turnbull's theories of business, which were
in flat repudiation of the laws of Him who alone understands
either man or his business, she yet had not a doubt of his
honesty as the trades and professions count honesty. Her father
had left the money affairs of the firm to Mr. Turnbull, and she
did the same. It was for no other reason than that her position
had become almost intolerable, that she now began to wonder if
she was bound to this mode of life, and whether it might not be
possible to forsake it.

Greed is the soul's thieving; where there is greed, there can not
be honesty. John Turnbull, it is true, was not only proud of his
reputation for honesty, but prided himself on being an honest
man; yet not the less was he dishonest--and that with a
dishonesty such as few of those called thieves have attained to.

Like most of his kind, he had been neither so vulgar nor so
dishonest from the first. In the prime of youth he had had what
the people about him called high notions, and counted quixotic
fancies. But it was not their mockery of his tall talk that
turned him aside; opposition invariably confirmed Turnbull. He
had never set his face in the right direction. The seducing
influence lay in himself. It was not the truth he had loved; it
was the show of fine sentiment he had enjoyed. The distinction of
holding loftier opinions than his neighbors was the ground of his
advocacy of them. Something of the beauty of the truth he must
have seen--who does not?--else he could not have been thus moved
at all; but he had never denied himself even a whim for the
carrying out of one of his ideas; he had never set himself to be
better; and the whole mountain-chain, therefore, of his notions
sank and sank, until at length their loftiest peak was the maxim,
_Honesty is the best policy_--a maxim which, true enough in
fact, will no more make a man honest than the economic aphorism,
_The supply equals the demand_, will teach him the niceties
of social duty. Whoever makes policy the ground of his honesty
will discover more and more exceptions to the rule. The career,
therefore, of Turnbull of the high notions had been a gradual
descent to the level of his present dishonesty and vulgarity;
nothing is so vulgarizing as dishonesty. I do not care to follow
the history of any man downward. Let him who desires to look on
such a panorama, faithfully and thoroughly depicted, read
Auerbach's "Diethelm von Buchenberg."

Things went a little more quietly in the shop after this for a
while: Turnbull probably was afraid of precipitating matters, and
driving Mary to seek counsel--from which much injury might arise
to his condition and prospects. As if to make amends for past
rudeness, he even took some pains to be polite, putting on
something of the manners with which he favored his "best
customers," of all mankind in his eyes the most to be honored.
This, of course, rendered him odious in the eyes of Mary, and
ripened the desire to free herself from circumstances which from
garments seemed to have grown cerements. She was, however, too
much her father's daughter to do anything in haste.

She might have been less willing to abandon them, had she had any
friends like-minded with herself, but, while they were all kindly
disposed to her, none of the religious associates of her father,
who knew, or might have known her well, approved of her. They
spoke of her generally with a shake of the head, and an
unquestioned feeling that God was not pleased with her. There are
few of the so-called religious who seem able to trust either God
or their neighbor in matters that concern those two and no other.
Nor had she had opportunity of making acquaintance with any who
believed and lived like her father, in other of the Christian
communities of the town. But she had her Bible, and, when that
troubled her, as it did not a little sometimes, she had the
Eternal Wisdom to cry to for such wisdom as she could receive;
and one of the things she learned was, that nowhere in the Bible
was she called on to believe in the Bible, but in the living God,
in whom is no darkness, and who alone can give light to
understand his own intent. All her troubles she carried to him.

It was not always the solitude of her room that Mary sought to
get out of the wind of the world. Her love of nature had been
growing stronger, notably, from her father's death. If the world
is God's, every true man ought to feel at home in it. Something
is wrong if the calm of the summer night does not sink into the
heart, for the peace of God is there embodied. Sometime is wrong
in the man to whom the sunrise is not a divine glory for therein
are embodied the truth, the simplicity, the might of the Maker.
When all is true in us, we shall feel the visible presence of the
Watchful and Loving; for the thing that he works is its sign and
symbol, its clothing fact. In the gentle conference of earth and
sky, in the witnessing colors of the west, in the wind that so
gently visited her cheek, in the great burst of a new morning,
Mary saw the sordid affairs of Mammon, to whose worship the shop
seemed to become more and more of a temple, sink to the bottom of
things, as the mud, which, during the day, the feet of the
drinking cattle have stirred, sinks in the silent night to the
bottom of the clear pool; and she saw that the sordid is all in
the soul, and not in the shop. The service of Christ is help. The
service of Mammon is greed.

Letty was no good correspondent: after one letter in which she
declared herself perfectly happy, and another in which she said
almost nothing, her communication ceased. Mrs. Wardour had been
in the shop again and again, but on each occasion had sought the
service of another; and once, indeed, when Mary alone was
disengaged, had waited until another was at liberty. While Letty
was in her house, she had been civil, but, as soon as she was
gone, seemed to show that she held her concerned in the scandal
that had befallen Thornwick. Once, as I have said, she met
Godfrey. It was in the fields. He was walking hurriedly, as
usual, but with his head bent, and a gloomy gaze fixed upon
nothing visible. He started when he saw her, took his hat off,
and, with his eyes seeming to look far away beyond her, passed
without a word. Yet had she been to him a true pupil; for,
although neither of them knew it, Mary had learned more from
Godfrey than Godfrey was capable of teaching. She had turned
thought and feeling into life, into reality, into creation. They
speak of the _creations_ of the human intellect, of the
human imagination! there is nothing man can do comes half so near
the making of the Maker as the ordering of his way--except one
thing: the highest creation of which man is capable, is to will
the will of the Father. That _has_ in it an element of the
purely creative, and then is man likest God. But simply to do
what we ought, is an altogether higher, diviner, more potent,
more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the
most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the
most worshiping temple, dream out the most enchanting commotion
of melody and harmony. If Godfrey could have seen the soul of the
maiden into whose face his discourtesy called the hot blood, he
would have beheld there simply what God made the earth for; as it
was, he saw a shop-girl, to whom in happier circumstances he had
shown kindness, in whom he was now no longer interested. But the
sight of his troubled face called up all the mother in her; a
rush of tenderness, born of gratitude, flooded her heart. He was
sad, and she could do nothing to comfort him! He had been royally
good to her, and no return was in her power. She could not even
let him know how she had profited by his gifts! She could come
near him with no ministration! The bond between them was an
eternal one, yet were they separated by a gulf of unrelation. Not
a mountain-range, but a stayless nothingness parted them. She
built many a castle, with walls of gratitude and floors of
service to entertain Godfrey Wardour; but they stood on no
foundation of imagined possibility.




CHAPTER XX.

THE WEDDING-DRESS.


For all her troubles, however, Mary had her pleasures, even in
the shop. It was a delight to receive the friendly greetings of
such as had known and honored her father. She had the pleasure,
as real as it was simple, of pure service, reaping the fruit of
the earth in the joy of the work that was given her to do; there
is no true work that does not carry its reward though there are
few that do not drop it and lose it. She gathered also the
pleasure of seeing and talking with people whose manners and
speech were of finer grain and tone than those about her. When
Hesper Mortimer entered the shop, she brought with her delight;
her carriage was like the gait of an ode; her motions were
rhythm; and her speech was music. Her smile was light, and her
whole presence an enchantment to Mary. The reading aloud which
Wardour had led her to practice had taught her much, not only in
respect of the delicacies of speech and utterance, but in the
deeper matters of motion, relation, and harmony. Hesper's clear-
cut but not too sharply defined consonants; her soft but full-
bodied vowels; above all, her slow cadences that hovered on the
verge of song, as her walk on the verge of a slow aerial dance;
the carriage of her head, the movements of her lips, her arms,
her hands; the self-possession that seemed the very embodiment of
law--these formed together a whole of inexpressible delight,
inextricably for Mary associated with music and verse: she would
hasten to serve her as if she had been an angel come to do a
little earthly shopping, and return with the next heavenward
tide. Hesper, in response all but unconscious, would be waited on
by no other than Mary; and always between them passed some sweet,
gentle nothings, which afforded Hesper more pleasure than she
could have accounted for.

Her wedding-day was now for the third time fixed, when one
morning she entered the shop to make some purchases. Not happy in
the prospect before her, she was yet inclined to make the best of
it so far as clothes were concerned--the more so, perhaps, that
she had seldom yet been dressed to her satisfaction: she was now
brooding over a certain idea for her wedding-dress, which she had
altogether failed in the attempt to convey to her London
_couturiere_; and it had come into her head to try whether
Mary might not grasp her idea, and help her to make it
intelligible. Mary listened and thought, questioned, and desired
explanations--at length, begged she would allow her to ponder the
thing a little: she could hardly at once venture to say anything.
Hesper laughed, and said she was taking a small matter too
seriously--concluding from Mary's hesitation that she had but
perplexed her, and that she could be of no use to her in the
difficulty.

"A small matter? Your wedding-dress!" exclaimed Mary, in a tone
of expostulation.

Hesper did not laugh again, but gave a little sigh instead, which
struck sadly on Mary's sympathetic heart. She cast a quick look
in her face. Hesper caught the look, and understood it. For one
passing moment she felt as if, amid the poor pleasure of adorning
herself for a hated marriage, she had found a precious thing of
which she had once or twice dreamed, never thought as a possible
existence--a friend, namely, to love her: the next, she saw the
absurdity of imagining a friend in a shop-girl.

"But I must make up my mind so soon!" she answered. "Madame
Crepine gave me her idea, in answer to mine, but nothing like it,
two days ago; and, as I have not written again, I fear she may be
taking her own way with the thing. I am certain to hate it."

"I will talk to you about it as early as you please to-morrow, if
that will do," returned Mary.

She knew nothing about dressmaking beyond what came of a true
taste, and the experience gained in cutting out and making her
own garments, which she had never yet found a dressmaker to do to
her mind; and, indeed, Hesper had been led to ask her advice
mainly from observing how neat the design of her dresses was, and
how faithfully they fitted her. Dress is a sort of freemasonry
between girls.

"But I can not have the horses to-morrow," said Hesper.

"I might," pondered Mary aloud, after a moment's silence, "walk
out to Durnmelling this evening after the shop is shut. By that
time I shall have been able to think; I find it impossible, with
you before me."

Hesper acknowledged the compliment with a very pleasant smile. If
it be true, as I may not doubt, that women, in dressing, have the
fear of women and not of men before their eyes, then a compliment
from some women must be more acceptable to some than a compliment
from any man but the specially favored.

"Thank you a thousand times," she drawled, sweetly. "Then I shall
expect you. Ask for my maid. She will take you to my room. Good-
by for the present."

As soon as she was gone, Mary, her mind's eye full of her figure,
her look, her style, her motion, gave herself to the important
question of the dress conceived by Hesper; and during her dinner-
hour contrived to cut out and fit to her own person the pattern
of a garment such as she supposed intended in the not very lucid
description she had given her. When she was free, she set out
with it for Durnmelling.

It was rather a long walk, the earlier part of it full of sad
reminders of the pleasure with which, greater than ever
accompanied her to church, she went to pay her Sunday visit at
Thornwick; but the latter part, although the places were so near,
almost new to her: she had never been within the gate of
Durnmelling, and felt curious to see the house of which she had
so often heard.

The butler opened the door to her--an elderly man, of conscious
dignity rather than pride, who received the "young person"
graciously, and, leaving her in the entrance-hall, went to find
"Miss Mortimer's maid," he said, though there was but one lady's-
maid in the establishment.

The few moments she had to wait far more than repaid her for the
trouble she had taken: through a side-door she looked into the
great roofless hall, the one grand thing about the house. Its
majesty laid hold upon her, and the shopkeeper's daughter felt
the power of the ancient dignity and ineffaceable beauty far more
than any of the family to which it had for centuries belonged.

She was standing lost in delight, when a rude voice called to her
from half-way up a stair:

"You're to come this way, miss."

With a start, she turned and went. It was a large room to which
she was led. There was no one in it, and she walked to an open
window, which had a wide outlook across the fields. A little to
the right, over some trees, were the chimneys of Thornwick. She
almost started to see them--so near, and yet so far--like the
memory of a sweet, sad story.

"Do you like my prospect?" asked the voice of Hesper behind her.
"It is flat."

"I like it much, Miss Mortimer," answered Mary, turning quickly
with a bright face. "Flatness has its own beauty. I sometimes
feel as if room was all I wanted; and of that there is so much
there! You see over the tree-tops, too, and that is good--
sometimes--don't you think?"

Miss Mortimer gave no other reply than a gentle stare, which
expressed no curiosity, although she had a vague feeling that
Mary's words meant something. Most girls of her class would
hardly have got so far.

The summer was backward, but the day had been fine and warm, and
the evening was dewy and soft, and full of evasive odor. The
window looked westward, and the setting sun threw long shadows
toward the house. A gentle wind was moving in the tree-tops. The
spirit of the evening had laid hold of Mary. The peace of
faithfulness filled the air. The day's business vanished, molten
in the rest of the coming night. Even Hesper's wedding-dress was
gone from her thoughts. She was in her own world, and ready, for
very, quietness of spirit, to go to sleep. But she had not
forgotten the delight of Hesper's presence; it was only that all
relation between them was gone except such as was purely human.

"This reminds me so of some beautiful verses of Henry Vaughan!"
she said, half dreamily.

"What do they say?" drawled Hesper.

Mary repeated as follows:

  "'The frosts are past, the storms are gone,
  And backward life at last comes on.
  And here in dust and dirt, O here,
  The Lilies of His love appear!'"

"Whose did you say the lines were?" asked Hesper, with merest
automatic response.

"Henry Vaughan's," answered Mary, with a little spiritual shiver
as of one who had dropped a pearl in the miry way.

"I never heard of him," rejoined Hesper, with entire
indifference.

For anything she knew, he might be an occasional writer in "The
Belgrave Magazine," or "The Fireside Herald." Ignorance is one of
the many things of which a lady of position is never ashamed;
wherein she is, it may be, more right than most of my readers
will be inclined to allow; for ignorance is not the thing to be
ashamed of, but neglect of knowledge. That a young person in
Mary's position should know a certain thing, was, on the other
hand, a reason why a lady in Hesper's position should not know
it! Was it possible a shop-girl should know anything that Hesper
ought to know and did not? It was foolish of Mary, perhaps, but
she had vaguely felt that a beautiful lady like Miss Mortimer,
and with such a name as Hesper, must know all the lovely things
she knew, and many more besides.

"He lived in the time of the Charleses," she said, with a tremble
in her voice, for she was ashamed to show her knowledge against
the other's ignorance.

"Ah!" drawled Hesper, with a confused feeling that people who
kept shops read stupid old books that lay about, because they
could not subscribe to a circulating library.--"Are you fond of
poetry?" she added; for the slight, shadowy shyness, into which
her venture had thrown Mary, drew her heart a little, though she
hardly knew it, and inclined her to say something.

"Yes," answered Mary, who felt like a child questioned by a
stranger in the road; "--when it is good," she added,
hesitatingly.

"What do you mean by good?" asked Hesper--out of her knowledge,
Mary thought, but it was not even out of her ignorance, only out
of her indifference. People must say something, lest life should
stop.

"That is a question difficult to answer," replied Mary. "I have
often asked it of myself, but never got any plain answer."

"I do not see why you should find any difficulty in it," returned
Hesper, with a shadow of interest. "You know what you mean when
you say to yourself you like this, or you do not like that."

"How clever she is, too!" thought Mary; but she answered: "I
don't think I ever say anything to myself about the poetry I
read--not at the time, I mean. If I like it, it drowns me; and,
if I don't like it, it is as the Dead Sea to me, in which you
know you can't sink, if you try ever so."

Hesper saw nothing in the words, and began to fear that Mary was
so stupid as to imagine herself clever; whereupon the fancy she
had taken to her began to sink like water in sand. The two were
still on their feet, near the window--Mary, in her bonnet, with
her back to it, and Hesper, in evening attire, with her face to
the sunset, so that the one was like a darkling worshiper, the
other like the radiant goddess. But the truth was, that Hesper
was a mere earthly woman, and Mary a heavenly messenger to her.
Neither of them knew it, but so it was; for the angels are
essentially humble, and Hesper would have condescended to any
angel out of her own class.

"I think I know good poetry by what it does to me," resumed Mary,
thoughtfully, just as Hesper was about to pass to the business of
the hour.

"Indeed!" rejoined Hesper, not less puzzled than before, if the
word should be used where there was no effort to understand.
Poetry had never done anything to her, and Mary's words conveyed
no shadow of an idea.

The tone of her _indeed_ checked Mary. She hesitated a
moment, but went on.

"Sometimes," she said, "it makes me feel as if my heart were too
big for my body; sometimes as if all the grand things in heaven
and earth were trying to get into me at once; sometimes as if I
had discovered something nobody else knew; sometimes as if--no,
not _as if_, for then I _must_ go and pray to God. But
I am trying to tell you what I don't know how to tell. I am not
talking nonsense, I hope, only ashamed of myself that I can't
talk sense.--I will show you what I have been doing about your
dress."

Far more to Hesper's surprise and admiration than any of her
half-foiled attempts at the utterance of her thoughts, Mary,
taking from her pocket the shape she had prepared, put it on
herself, and, slowly revolving before Hesper, revealed what in
her eyes was a masterpiece.

"But how clever of you!" she cried.--Her own fingers had not been
quite innocent of the labor of the needle, for money had long
been scarce at Durnmelling, and in the paper shape she recognized
the hand of an artist.--"Why," she continued, "you are nothing
less than an accomplished dressmaker!"

"That I dare not think myself," returned Mary, "seeing I never
had a lesson."

"I wish you would make my wedding-dress," said Hesper.

"I could not venture, even if I had the time," answered Mary.
"The moment I began to cut into the stuff, I should be terrified,
and lose my self-possession. I never made a dress for anybody but
myself."

"You are a little witch!" said Hesper; while Mary, who had
roughly prepared a larger shape, proceeded to fit it to her
person.

She was busy pinning and unpinning, shifting and pinning again,
when suddenly Hesper said:

"I suppose you know I am going to marry money?"

"Oh! don't say that. It's too dreadful!" cried Mary, stopping her
work, and looking up in Hesper's face.

"What! you supposed I was going to marry a man like Mr. Redmain
for love?" rejoined Hesper, with a hard laugh.

"I can not bear to think of it!" said Mary. "But you do not
really mean it! You are only--making fun of me! Do say you are."

"Indeed, I am not. I wish I could say I was! It is very horrid, I
know, but where's the good of mincing matters? If I did not call
the thing by its name, the thing would be just the same. You
know, people in our world have to do as they must; they can't
pick and choose like you happy creatures. I dare say, now, you
are engaged to a young man you love with all your heart, one you
would rather marry than any other in the whole universe."

"Oh, dear, no!" returned Mary, with a smile most plainly fancy-
free. "I am not engaged, nor in the least likely to be."

"And not in love either?" said Hesper--with such coolness that
Mary looked up in her face to know if she had really said so.

"No," she replied.

"No more am I," echoed Hesper; "that is the one good thing in the
business: I sha'n't break my heart, as some girls do. At least,
so they say--I don't believe it: how could a girl be so indecent?
It is bad enough to marry a man: that one can't avoid; but to die
of a broken heart is to be a traitor to your sex. As if women
couldn't live without men!"

Mary smiled and was silent. She had read a good deal, and thought
she understood such things better than Miss Mortimer. But she
caught herself smiling, and she felt as if she had sinned. For
that a young woman should speak of love and marriage as Miss
Mortimer did, was too horrible to be understood--and she had
smiled! She would have been less shocked with Hesper, however,
had she known that she forced an indifference she could not feel
--her last poor rampart of sand against the sea of horror rising
around her. But from her heart she pitied her, almost as one of
the lost.

"Don't fix your eyes like that," said Hesper, angrily, "or I
shall cry. Look the other way, and listen.--I am marrying money,
I tell you--and for money; therefore, I ought to get the good of
it. Mr. Mortimer will be father enough to see to that! So I shall
be able to do what I please. I have fallen in love with you; and
why shouldn't I have you for my--"

She paused, hesitating: what was it she was about to propose to
the little lady standing before her? She had been going to say
_maid_: what was it that checked her? The feeling was to
herself shapeless and nameless; but, however some of my readers
may smile at the notion of a girl who served behind a counter
being a lady, and however ready Hesper Mortimer would have been
to join them, it was yet a vague sense of the fact that was now
embarrassing her, for she was not half lady enough to deal with
it. In very truth, Mary Marston was already immeasurably more of
a lady than Hesper Mortimer was ever likely to be in this world.
What was the stateliness and pride of the one compared to the
fact that the other would have died in the workhouse or the
street rather than let a man she did not love embrace her--yes,
if all her ancestors in hell had required the sacrifice! To be a
martyr to a lie is but false ladyhood. She only is a lady who
witnesses to the truth, come of it what may.

"--For my--my companion, or something of the sort," concluded
Hesper; "and then I should be sure of being always dressed to my
mind."

"That _would_ be nice!" responded Mary, thinking only of the
kindness in the speech.

"Would you really like it?" asked Hesper, in her turn pleased.

"I should like it very much," replied Mary, not imagining the
proposal had in it a shadow of seriousness. "I wish it were
possible."

"Why not, then? Why shouldn't it be possible? I don't suppose you
would mind using your needle a little?"

"Not in the least," answered Mary, amused. "Only what would they
do in the shop without me?"

"They could get somebody else, couldn't they?"

"Hardly, to take my place. My father was Mr. Turnbull's partner."

"Oh!" said Hesper, not much instructed. "I thought you had only
to give warning."

There the matter dropped, and Mary thought no more about it.

"You will let me keep this pattern?" said Hesper.

"It was made for you," answered Mary.

While Hesper was lazily thinking whether that meant she was to
pay for it, Mary made her a pretty obeisance, and bade her good
night. Hesper returned her adieu kindly, but neither shook hands
with her nor rang the bell to have her shown out Mary found her
own way, however, and presently was breathing the fresh air of
the twilight fields on her way home to her piano and her books.

For some time after she was gone, Hesper was entirely occupied
with the excogitation of certain harmonies of the toilet that
must minister effect to the dress she had now so plainly before
her mind's eye; but by and by the dress began to melt away, and
like a dissolving view disappeared, leaving in its place the form
of "that singular shop-girl." There was nothing striking about
her; she made no such sharp impression on the mind as compelled
one to think of her again; yet always, when one had been long
enough in her company to feel the charm of her individuality, the
very quiet of any quiet moment was enough to bring back the
sweetness of Mary's twilight presence. For this girl, who spent
her days behind a counter, was one of the spiritual forces at
work for the conservation and recovery of the universe.

Not only had Hesper Mortimer never had a friend worthy of the
name, but no idea of pure friendship had as yet been generated in
her. Sepia was the nearest to her intimacy: how far friendship
could have place between two such I need not inquire; but in her
fits of misery Hesper had no other to go to. Those fits, alas!
grew less and less frequent; for Hesper was on the downward
incline; but, when the next came, after this interview, she found
herself haunted, at a little distance, as it were, by a strange
sense of dumb, invisible tending. It did not once come close to
her; it did not once offer her the smallest positive consolation;
the thing was only this, that the essence of Mary's being was so
purely ministration, that her form could not recur to any memory
without bringing with it a dreamy sense of help. Most powerful of
all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more
powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy,
but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action. Had
anything that Mary said recurred to Hesper, she would have
thought of it only as the poor sentimentality of a low education.

But Hesper did not think of Mary's position as low; that would
have been to measure it; and it did not once suggest itself as
having any relation to any life in which she was interested. She
saw no difference of level between Mary and the lawyer who came
about her marriage settlements: they were together beyond her
social horizon. In like manner, moral differences--and that in
her own class--were almost equally beyond recognition. If by
neglect of its wings, an eagle should sink to a dodo, it would
then recognize only the laws of dodo life. For the dodos of
humanity, did not one believe in a consuming fire and an outer
darkness, what would be left us but an ever-renewed _alas_!
It is truth and not imperturbability that a man's nature requires
of him; it is help, not the leaving of cards at doors, that will
be recognized as the test; it is love, and no amount of flattery
that will prosper; differences wide as that between a gentleman
and a cad will contract to a hair's breadth in that day; the
customs of the trade and the picking of pockets will go together,
with the greater excuse for the greater need and the less
knowledge; liars the most gentleman-like and the most rowdy will
go as liars; the first shall be last, and the last first.

Hesper's day drew on. She had many things to think about--things
very different from any that concerned Mary Marston. She was
married; found life in London somewhat absorbing; and forgot
Mary.




CHAPTER XXI.

MR. REDMAIN.


A life of comparatively innocent gayety could not be attractive
to Mr. Redmain, but at first he accompanied his wife everywhere.
No one knew better than he that not an atom of love had mingled
with her motives in marrying him; but for a time he seemed bent
on showing her that she needed not have been so averse to him.
Whether this was indeed his design or not, I imagine he enjoyed
the admiration she roused: for why should not a man take pride in
the possession of a fine woman as well as in that of a fine
horse? To be sure, Mrs. Redmain was not quite in the same way,
nor quite so much his, as his horses were, and might one day be a
good deal less his than she was now; but in the mean time she
was, I fancy, a pleasant break in the gathering monotony of his
existence. As he got more accustomed to the sight of her in a
crowd, however, and at the same time to her not very interesting
company in private, when she took not the smallest pains to
please him, he gradually lapsed into his former ways, and soon
came to spend his evenings in company that made him forget his
wife. He had loved her in a sort of a way, better left undefined,
and had also, almost from the first, hated her a little; for,
following her cousin's advice, she had appealed to him to save
her, and, when he evaded her prayer, had addressed him in certain
terms too appropriate to be agreeable, and too forcible to be
forgotten. His hatred, however, if that be not much too strong a
name, was neither virulent nor hot, for it had no inverted love
to feed and embitter it. It was more a thing of his head than his
heart, revealing itself mainly in short, acrid speeches, meant to
be clever, and indubitably disagreeable. Nor did Hesper prove an
unworthy antagonist in their encounters of polite Billingsgate:
what she lacked in experience she made up in breeding. The common
remark, generally false, about no love being lost, was in their
case true enough, for there never had been any between them to
lose. The withered rose-leaves have their sweetness yet, but what
of the rotted peony? It was generally when Redmain had been
longer than usual without seeing his wife that he said the worst
things to her, as if spite had grown in absence; but that he
should then be capable of saying such things as he did say, could
be understood only by those who knew the man and his history.

Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain--parents with mean surroundings often
give grand names to their children--was the son of an
intellectually gifted laborer, who, rising first to be boss of a
gang, began to take portions of contracts, and arrived at last,
through one lucky venture after another, at having his estimate
accepted and the contract given him for a rather large affair.
The result was that, through his minute knowledge of details, his
faculty for getting work out of his laborers, a toughness of
heart and will that enabled him to screw wages to the lowest
mark, and the judicious employment of inferior material, the
contract paid him much too well for any good to come out of it.
From that time, what he called his life was a continuous course
of what he called success, and he died one of the richest dirt-
beetles of the age, bequeathing great wealth to his son, and
leaving a reputation for substantial worth behind him; hardly
leaving it, I fancy, for surely he found it waiting him where he
went. He had been guilty of a thousand meannesses, oppressions,
rapacities, and some quiet rogueries, but none of them worse than
those of many a man whose ultimate failure has been the sole
cause of his excommunication by the society which all the time
knew well enough what he was. Often had he been held up by
would-be teachers as a pattern to aspiring youth of what might
be achieved by unwavering attention to _the main chance_,
combined with unassailable honesty: from his experience they
would once more prove to a gaping world the truth of the maxim,
the highest intelligible to a base soul, that "honesty is the
best policy." With his money he left to his son the seeds of a
varied meanness, which bore weeds enough, but curiously, neither
avarice nor, within the bounds of a modest prudence, any
unwillingness to part with money--a fact which will probably
appear the stranger when I have told the following anecdote
concerning a brother of the father, of whom few indeed mentioned
in my narrative ever heard.

This man was a joiner, or working cabinet-maker, or something of
the sort. Having one day been set by his master to repair for an
old lady an escritoire which had been in her possession for a
long time, he came to her house in the evening with a five-pound
note of a country bank, which he had found in a secret drawer of
the same, handing it to her with the remark that he had always
found honesty the best policy. She gave him half a sovereign, and
he took his leave well satisfied. _He had been first to make
inquiry, and had learned that the bank stopped payment many years
ago._ I can not help wondering, curious in the statistics of
honesty, how many of my readers will be more amused than
disgusted with the story. It is a great thing to come of decent
people, and Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain must not be judged like
one who, of honorable parentage, whether noble or peasant, takes
himself across to the shady side of the road. Much had been
against Redmain. I do not know of what sort his mother was, but
from certain embryonic virtues in him, which could hardly have
been his father's, I should think she must have been better than
her husband. She died, however, while he was a mere child; and
his father married, some said did not _marry_ again. The boy
was sent to a certain public school, which at that time, whatever
it may or may not be now, was simply a hot-bed of the lowest
vices, and in devil-matters Redmain was an apt pupil. There is
fresh help for the world every time a youth starts clean upon
manhood's race; his very being is a hope of cleansing: this one
started as foul as youth could well be, and had not yet begun to
repent. His character was well known to his associates, for he
was no hypocrite, and Hosper's father knew it perfectly, and was
therefore worse than he. Had Redmain had a daughter, he would
never have given her to a man like himself. But, then, Mortimer
was so poor, and Redmain was so _very_ rich! Alas for the
man who degrades his poverty by worshiping wealth! there is no
abyss in hell too deep for him to find its bottom.

Mr. Redmain had no profession, and knew nothing of business
beyond what was necessary for understanding whether his factor or
steward, or whatever he called him, was doing well with his
money--to that he gave heed. Also, wiser than many, he took some
little care not to spend at full speed what life he had. With
this view he laid down and observed certain rules in the ordering
of his pleasures, which enabled him to keep ahead of the vice-
constable for some time longer than would otherwise have been the
case. But he is one who can never finally be outrun, and now, as
Mr. Redmain was approaching the end of middle age, he heard
plainly enough the approach of the wool-footed avenger behind
him. Horrible was the inevitable to him, as horrible as to any;
but it had not yet looked frightful enough to arrest his downward
rush. In his better conditions--physical, I mean--whether he had
any better moral conditions, I can not tell--he would laugh and
say, "_Gather the roses while you may_"--heaven and earth!
what roses!--but, in his worse, he maledicted everything, and was
horribly afraid of hell. When in tolerable health, he laughed at
the notion of such an out-of-the-way place, repudiating its very
existence, and, calling in all the arguments urged by good men
against the idea of an eternity of aimless suffering, used them
against the idea of any punishment after death. Himself a bad
man, he reasoned that God was too good to punish sin; himself a
proud man, he reasoned that God was too high to take heed of him.
He forgot the best argument he could have adduced--namely, that
the punishment he had had in this life had done him no good; from
which he might have been glad to argue that none would, and
therefore none would be tried. But I suppose his mother believed
there was a hell, for at such times, when from weariness he was
less of an evil beast than usual, the old-fashioned horror would
inevitably raise its dinosaurian head afresh above the slime of
his consciousness; and then even his wife, could she have seen
how the soul of the man shuddered and recoiled, would have let
his brutality pass unheeded, though it was then at its worst, his
temper at such times being altogether furious. There was no grace
in him when he was ill, nor at any time, beyond a certain cold
grace of manner, which he kept for ceremony, or where he wanted
to please.

Happily, Mr. Redmain had one intellectual passion, which, poor
thing as it was, and in its motive, most of its aspects, and
almost all its tendencies, evil exceedingly, yet did something to
delay that corruption of his being which, at the same time, it
powerfully aided to complete: it was for the understanding and
analysis of human evil--not in the abstract, but alive and
operative. For the appeasement of this passion, he must render
intelligible to himself, and that on his own exclusive theory of
human vileness, the aims and workings of every fresh specimen of
what he called human nature that seemed bad enough, or was
peculiar enough to interest him. In this region of darkness he
ranged like a discoverer--prowled rather, like an unclean beast
of prey--ever and always on the outlook for the false and foul;
acknowledging, it is true, that he was no better himself, but
arrogating on that ground a correctness of judgment beyond the
reach of such as, desiring to be better, were unwilling to
believe in the utter badness of anything human. Like a lover, he
would watch for the appearance of the vile motive, the self-
interest, that "must be," _he knew_, at the heart of this or
that deed or proceeding of apparent benevolence or generosity.
Often, alas! the thing was provable; and, where he did not find,
he was quick to invent; and, where he failed in finding or
inventing, he not the less believed the bad motive was there, and
followed the slightest seeming trail of the cunning demon only
the more eagerly. What a smile was his when he heard, which truly
he was not in the way to hear often, the praise of some good
deed, or an ascription of high end to some endeavor of one of the
vile race to which he belonged! Do those who abuse their kind
actually believe they are of it? Do they hold themselves
exceptions? Do they never reflect that it must be because such is
their own nature, whether their accusation be true or false, that
they know how to attribute such motives to their fellows? Or is
it that, actually and immediately rejoicing in iniquity, they
delight in believing it universal?

Quiet as a panther, Redmain was, I say, always in pursuit, if not
of something sensual for himself, then of something evil in
another. He would sit at his club, silent and watching, day after
day, night after night, waiting for the chance that should cast
light on some idea of detection, on some doubt, bewilderment, or
conjecture. He would ask the farthest-off questions: who could
tell what might send him into the track of discovery? He would
give to the talk the strangest turns, laying trap after trap to
ensnare the most miserable of facts, elevated into a desirable
secret only by his hope to learn through it something equally
valueless beyond it. Especially he delighted in discovering, or
flattering himself he had discovered, the hollow full of dead
men's bones under the flowery lawn of seeming goodness. Nor as
yet had he, so far as he knew, or at least was prepared to allow,
ever failed. And this he called the study of human nature, and
quoted Pope. Truly, next to God, the proper study of mankind is
man; but how shall a man that knows only the evil in himself, nor
sees it hateful, read the thousandfold-compounded heart of his
neighbor? To rake over the contents of an ash-pit, is not to
study geology. There were motives in Redmain's own being, which
he was not merely incapable of understanding, but incapable of
seeing, incapable of suspecting.

The game had for him all the pleasure of keenest speculation; nor
that alone, for, in the supposed discovery of the evil of
another, he felt himself vaguely righteous.

One more point in his character I may not in fairness omit: he
had naturally a strong sense of justice; and, if he exercised it
but little in some of the relations of his life, he was none the
less keenly alive to his own claims on its score; for chiefly he
cried out for fair play on behalf of those who were wicked in
similar fashion to himself. But, in truth, no one dealt so hardly
with Redmain as his own conscience at such times when suffering
and fear had awaked it.

So much for a portrait-sketch of the man to whom Mortimer had
sold his daughter--such was the man whom Hesper, entirely aware
that none could compel her to marry against her will, had, partly
from fear of her father, partly from moral laziness, partly from
reverence for the Moloch of society, whose priestess was her
mother, vowed to love, honor, and obey! In justice to her, it
must be remembered, however, that she did not and could not know
of him what her father knew.




CHAPTER XXII.

MRS. REDMAIN.


In the autumn the Redmains went to Durnmelling: why they did so,
I should find it hard to say. If, when a child, Hesper loved
either of her parents, the experiences of later years had so
heaped that filial affection with the fallen leaves of dead hopes
and vanished dreams, that there was now nothing in her heart
recognizable to herself as love to father or mother. She always
behaved to them, of course, with perfect propriety; never refused
any small request; never showed resentment when blamed--never
felt any, for she did not care enough to be angry or sorry that
father or mother should disapprove.

On the other hand, Lady Margaret saw great improvement in her
daughter. To the maternal eye, jealous for perfection, Hesper's
carriage was at length satisfactory. It was cold, and the same to
her mother as to every one else, but the mother did not find it
too cold. It was haughty, even repellent, but by no means in the
mother's eyes repulsive. Her voice came from her in well-balanced
sentences, sounding as if they had been secretly constructed for
extempore use, like the points of a parliamentary orator.
"Marriage has done everything for her!" said Lady Malice to
herself with a dignified chuckle, and dismissed the last shadowy
remnant of maternal regret for her part in the transaction of her
marriage.

She never saw herself in the wrong, and never gave herself the
least trouble to be in the right. She was in good health, ate,
and liked to eat; drank her glass of champagne, and would have
drunk a second, but for her complexion, and that it sometimes
made her feel ill, which was the only thing, after marrying Mr.
Redmain, she ever felt degrading. Of her own worth she had never
had a doubt, and she had none yet: how was she to generate one,
courted wherever she went, both for her own beauty and her
husband's wealth?

To her father she was as stiff and proud as if she had been a
maiden aunt, bent on destroying what expectations from her he
might be cherishing. Who will blame her? He had done her all the
ill he could, and by his own deed she was beyond his reach. Nor
can I see that the debt she owed him for being her father was of
the heaviest.

Her husband was again out of health--certain attacks to which he
was subject were now coming more frequently. I do not imagine his
wife offered many prayers for his restoration. Indeed, she never
prayed for the thing she desired; and, while he and she occupied
separate rooms, the one solitary thing she now regarded as a
privilege, how _could_ she pray for his recovery?

Greatly contrary to Mr. Redmain's unexpressed desire, Miss
Yolland had been installed as Hesper's cousin-companion. After
the marriage, she ventured to unfold a little, as she had
promised, but what there was yet of womanhood in Hesper had
shrunk from further acquaintance with the dimly shadowed
mysteries of Sepia's story; and Sepia, than whom none more
sensitive to change of atmosphere, had instantly closed again;
and now not unfrequently looked and spoke like one feeling her
way. The only life-principle she had, so far as I know, was to
get from the moment the greatest possible enjoyment that would
leave the way clear for more to follow. She had not been in his
house a week before Mr. Redmain hated her. He was something given
to hating people who came near him, and she came much too near.
She was by no means so different in character as to be repulsive
to him; neither was she so much alike as to be tiresome; their
designs could not well clash, for she was a woman and he was a
man; if she had not been his wife's friend, they might, perhaps,
have got on together better than well; but the two were such as
must either be hand in glove or hate each other. There had not,
however, been the least approach to rupture between them. Mr.
Redmain, indeed, took no trouble to avoid such a catastrophe, but
Sepia was far too wise to allow even the dawn of such a risk.
When he was ill, he was, if possible, more rude to her than to
every one else, but she did not seem to mind it a straw. Perhaps
she knew something of the ways of such _gentlemen_ as lose
their manners the moment they are ailing, and seem to consider a
headache or an attack of indigestion excuse sufficient for
behaving like the cad they scorn. It was not long, however,
before he began to take in her a very real interest, though not
of a sort it would have made her comfortable with him to know.

Every time Mr. Redmain had an attack, the baldness on the top of
his head widened, and the skin of his face tightened on his
small, neat features; his long arms looked longer; his formerly
flat back rounded yet a little; and his temper grew yet more
curiously spiteful. Long after he had begun to recover, he was by
no means an agreeable companion. Nevertheless, as if at last,
though late in the day, she must begin to teach her daughter the
duty of a married woman, from the moment he arrived, taken ill on
the way, Lady Malice, regardless of the brusqueness with which he
treated her from the first, devoted herself to him with an
attention she had never shown her husband. She was the only one
who manifested any appearance of affection for him, and the only
one of the family for whom, in return, he came to show the least
consideration. Rough he was, even to her, but never, except when
in absolute pain, rude as to everybody in the house besides. At
times, one might have almost thought he stood in some little awe
of her. Every night, after his man was gone, she would visit him
to see that he was left comfortable, would tuck him up as his
mother might have done, and satisfy herself that the night-light
was shaded from his eyes. With her own hands she always arranged
his breakfast on the tray, nor never omitted taking him a basin
of soup before he got up; and, whatever he may have concluded
concerning her motives, he gave no sign of imagining them other
than generous. Perhaps the part in him which had never had the
opportunity of behaving ill to his mother, and so had not choked
up its channels with wrong, remained, in middle age and illness,
capable of receiving kindness.

Hesper saw the relation between them, but without the least
pleasure or the least curiosity. She seemed to care for nothing--
except the keeping of her back straight. What could it be, inside
that lovely form, that gave itself pleasure to be, were a
difficult question indeed. The bear as he lies in his winter
nest, sucking his paw, has no doubt his rudimentary theories of
life, and those will coincide with a desire for its continuance;
but whether what either the lady or the bear counts the good of
life, be really that which makes either desire its continuance,
is another question. Mere life without suffering seems enough for
most people, but I do not think it could go on so for ever. I can
not help fancying that, but for death, utter dreariness would at
length master the healthiest in whom the true life has not begun
to shine. But so satisfying is the mere earthly existence to some
at present, that this remark must sound to them bare insanity.

Partly out of compliment to Mr. Redmain, the Mortimers had
scarcely a visitor; for he would not come out of his room when he
knew there was a stranger in the house. Fond of company of a
certain kind when he was well, he could not endure an unknown
face when ho was ill. He told Lady Malice that at such times a
stranger always looked a devil to him. Hence the time was dull
for everybody--dullest, perhaps, for Sepia, who, as well as
Redmain, had a few things that required forgetting. It was no
wonder, then, that Hesper, after a fort-night of it, should think
once more of the young woman in the draper's shop of Testbridge.
One morning, in consequence, she ordered her brougham, and drove
to the town.




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE MENIAL.


Things had been going nowise really better with Mary, though
there was now more lull and less storm around her. The position
was becoming less and less endurable to her, and she had as yet
no glimmer of a way out of it. Breath of genial air never blew in
the shop, except when this and that customer entered it. But how
dear the dull old chapel had grown! Not that she heard anything
more to her mind, or that she paid any more attention to what was
said; but the memory of her father filled the place, and when the
Bible was read, or some favorite hymn sung, he seemed to her
actually present. And might not love, she thought, even love to
her, be strong enough to bring him from the gracious freedom of
the new life, back to the house of bondage, to share it for an
hour with his daughter?

When Hesper entered, she was disappointed to see Mary so much
changed. But when, at sight of her, the pale face brightened, and
a faint, rosy flush overspread it from brow to chin, Mary was
herself again as Hesper had known her; and the radiance of her
own presence, reflected from Mary, cast a reflex of sunshine into
the February of Hesper's heart: had Mary known how long it was
since such a smile had lighted the face she so much admired, hers
would have flushed with a profounder pleasure. Hesper was human
after all, though her humanity was only molluscous as yet, and it
is not in the power of humanity in any stage of development to
hold itself indifferent to the pleasure of being loved. Also,
poor as is the feeling comparatively, it is yet a reflex of love
itself--the shine of the sun in a rain-pool.

She walked up to Mary, holding out her hand.

"O ma'am, I am so glad to see you!" exclaimed Mary, forgetting
her manners in her love.

"I, too, am glad," drawled Hesper, genuinely, though with
condescension. "I hope you are well. I can not say you look so."

"I am pretty well, thank you, ma'am," answered Mary, flushing
afresh: not much anxiety was anywhere expressed about her health
now, except by Beenie, who mourned over the loss of her
plumpness, and told her if she did not eat she would soon follow
her poor father.

"Come and have a drive with me," said Hesper, moved by a sudden
impulse: through some hidden motion of sympathy, she felt, as she
looked at her, that the place was stuffy. "It will do you good,"
she went on. "You are too much indoors.--And the ceiling is low,"
she added, looking up.

"It is very kind of you," replied Mary, "but--I don't think I
could quite manage it to-day."

She looked round as she spoke. There were not many customers; but
for conscience sake she was trying hard to give as little ground
for offense as possible.

"Why not?--If I were to ask Mr.--"

"If you really wish it, ma'am, I will venture to go for half an
hour. There is no occasion to speak to Mr. Turnbull. Besides, it
is almost dinner-time."

"Do, then. I am sure you will eat a better dinner for having had
a little fresh air first. It is a lovely morning. We will drive
to the Roman camp on the top of Clover-down."

"I shall be ready in two minutes," said Mary, and ran from the
shop.

As she passed along the outside of his counter coming back, she
stopped and told Mr. Turnbull where she was going. Instead of
answering her, he turned himself toward Mrs. Redmain, and went
through a series of bows and smiles recognizant of favor, which
she did not choose to see. She turned and walked from the shop,
got into the brougham, and made room for Mary at her side.

But, although the drive was a lovely one, and the view from
either window delightful, and to Mary it was like getting out of
a tomb to leave the shop in the middle of the day, she saw little
of the sweet country on any side, so much occupied was she with
Hesper. Ere they stopped again at the shop-door, the two young
women were nearer being friends than Hesper had ever been with
any one. The sleepy heart in her was not yet dead, but capable
still of the pleasure of showing sweet condescension and gentle
patronage to one who admired her, and was herself agreeable. To
herself she justified her kindness to Mary with the remark that
_the young woman deserved encouragement_--whatever that
might mean--_because she was so anxious to improve
herself!_--a duty Hesper could recognize in another.

As they went, Mary told her something of her miserable relations
with the Turnbulls; and, as they returned, Hesper actually--this
time with perfect seriousness--proposed that she should give up
business, and live with her.

Nor was this the ridiculous thing it may at first sight appear to
not a few of my readers. It arose from what was almost the first
movement in the direction of genuine friendship Hesper had ever
felt. She had been familiar in her time with a good many, but
familiarity is not friendship, and may or may not exist along
with it. Some, who would scorn the idea of a _friendship_
with such as Mary, will be familiar enough with maids as selfish
as themselves, and part from them--no--part _with_ them, the
next day, or the next hour, with never a twinge of regret. Of
this, Hesper was as capable as any; but friendship is its own
justification, and she felt no horror at the new motion of her
heart. At the same time she did not recognize it as friendship,
and, had she suspected Mary of regarding their possible relation
in that light, she would have dismissed her pride, perhaps
contempt. Nevertheless the sorely whelmed divine thing in her had
uttered a feeble sigh of incipient longing after the real; Mary
had begun to draw out the love in her; while her conventional
judgment justified the proposed extraordinary proceeding with the
argument of the endless advantages to result from having in the
house, devoted to her wishes, a young woman with an absolute
genius for dressmaking; one capable not only of originating in
that foremost of arts, but, no doubt, with a little experience,
of carrying out also with her own hands the ideas of her
mistress. No more would she have to send for the dressmaker on
every smallest necessity! No more must she postpone confidence in
her appearance, that was, in herself, until Sepia, dressed,
should be at leisure to look her over! Never yet had she found
herself the best dressed in a room: now there would be hope!

Nothing, however, was clear in her mind as to the position she
would have Mary occupy. She had a vague feeling that one like her
ought not to be expected to undertake things befitting such women
as her maid Folter; for between Mary and Folter there was, she
saw, less room for comparison than between Folter and a naked
Hottentot. She was incapable, at the same time, of seeing that,
in the eyes of certain courtiers of a high kingdom, not much
known to the world of fashion, but not the less judges of the
beautiful, there was a far greater difference between Mary and
herself than between herself and her maid, or between her maid
and the Hottentot. For, while the said beholders could hardly
have been astonished at Hesper's marrying Mr. Redmain, there
would, had Mary done such a thing, have been dismay and a hanging
of the head before the face of her Father in heaven.

"Come and live with me, Miss Marston," said Hesper; but it was
with a laugh, and that light touch of the tongue which suggests
but a flying fancy spoken but for the sake of the preposterous;
while Mary, not forgetting she had heard the same thing once
before, heard it with a smile, and had no rejoinder ready;
whereupon Hesper, who was, in reality, feeling her way, ventured
a little more seriousness.

"I should never ask you to do anything you would not like," she
said.

"I don't think you could," answered Mary. "There are more things
I should like to do for you than you would think to ask.--In
fact," she added, looking round with a loving smile, "I don't
know what I shouldn't like to do for you."

"My meaning was, that, as a thing of course, I should never ask
you to do anything menial," explained Hesper, venturing a little
further still, and now speaking in a tone perfectly matter-of-
fact.

"I don't know what you intend by _menial_," returned Mary.

Hesper thought it not unnatural she should not he familiar with
the word, and proceeded to explain it as well as she could. That
seeming ignorance may be the consequence of more knowledge, she
had yet to learn.

"_Menial_, don't you know?" she said, "is what you give
servants to do."

But therewith she remembered that Mary's help in certain things
wherein her maid's incapacity was harrowing, was one of the hopes
she mainly cherished in making her proposal: that definition of
_menial_ would hardly do.

"I mean--I mean," she resumed, with a little embarrassment, a
rare thing with her, "--things like--like--cleaning one's shoes,
don't you know?--or brushing your hair."

Mary burst out laughing.

"Let me come to you to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will
brush your hair that you will want me to come again the next day.
You beautiful creature! whose hands would not be honored to
handle such stuff as that?"

As she spoke, she took in her fingers a little stray drift from
the masses of golden twilight that crowned one of the loveliest
temples in which the Holy Ghost had not yet come to dwell.

"If cleaning your shoes be menial, brushing your hair must be
royal," she added.

Hesper's heart was touched; and if at the same time her
_self_ was flattered, the flattery was mingled with its best
antidote--love.

"Do you really mean," she said, "you would not mind doing such
things for me?--Of course I should not be exacting."

She laughed again, afraid of showing herself too much in earnest
before she was sure of Mary.

"You would not ask me to do anything _menial_?" said Mary,
archly.

"I dare not promise," said Hesper, in tone responsive. "How could
I help it, if I saw you longing to do what I was longing to have
you do?" she added, growing more and more natural.

"I would no more mind cleaning your boots than my own," said
Mary.

"But I should not like to clean my own boots," rejoined Hesper.

"No more should I, except it had to be done. Even then I would
much rather not," returned Mary, "for cleaning my own would not
interest me. To clean yours would. Still I would rather not, for
the time might be put to better use--except always it were
necessary, and then, of course, it couldn't. But as to anything
degrading in it, I scorn the idea. I heard my father once say
that, to look down on those who have to do such things may be to
despise them for just the one honorable thing about them.--Shall
I tell you what I understand by the word _menial_? You know
it has come to have a disagreeable taste about it, though at
first it only meant, as you say, something that fell to the duty
of attendants."

"Do tell me," answered Hesper, with careless permission.

"I did not find it out myself," said Mary. "My father taught me.
He was a wise as well as a good man, Mrs. Redmain."

"Oh!" said Hesper, with the ordinary indifference of fashionable
people to what an inferior may imagine worth telling them.

"He said," persisted Mary, notwithstanding, "that it is menial to
undertake anything you think beneath you for the sake of money;
and still more menial, having undertaken it, not to do it as well
as possible." "That would make out a good deal more of the menial
in the world than is commonly supposed," laughed Hesper. "I
wonder who would do anything for you if you didn't pay them--one
way or another!"

"I've taken my father's shoes out of Beenie's hands many a time,"
said Mary, "and finished them myself, just for the pleasure of
making them shine for _him_."

"Re-a-ally!" drawled Hesper, and set out for the conclusion that
after all it was no such great compliment the young woman had
paid her in wanting to brush her hair. Evidently she had a taste
for low things!--was naturally menial!--would do as much for her
own father as for a lady like her! But the light in Mary's eyes
checked her.

"Any service done without love, whatever it be," resumed Mary,
"is slavery--neither more nor less. It can not be anything else.
So, you see, most slaves are made slaves by themselves; and that
is what makes me doubtful whether I ought to go on serving in the
shop; for, as far as the Turnbulls are concerned, I have no
pleasure in it; I am only helping them to make money, not doing
them any good."

"Why do you not give it up at once then?" asked Hesper.

"Because I like serving the customers. They were my father's
customers; and I have learned so much from having to wait on
them!"

"Well, now," said Hesper, with a rush for the goal, "if you will
come to me, I will make you comfortable; and you shall do just as
much or as little as you please."

"What will your maid think?" suggested Mary. "If I am to do what
I please, she will soon find me trespassing on her domain."

"I never trouble myself about what my servants think," said
Hesper.

"But it might hurt her, you know--to be paid to do a thing and
then not allowed to do it,"

"She may take herself away, then. I had not thought of parting
with her, but I should not be at all sorry if she went. She would
be no loss to me."

"Why should you keep her, then?"

"Because one is just as good--and as bad as another. She knows my
ways, and I prefer not having to break in a new one. It is a bore
to have to say how you like everything done."

"But you are speaking now as if you meant it," said Mary, waking
up to the fact that Hesper's tone was of business, and she no
longer seemed half playing with the proposal. "_Do_ you mean
you want me to come and live with you?"

"Indeed, I do," answered Hesper, emphatically. "You shall have a
room close to my bedroom, and there you shall do as you like all
day long; and, when I want you, I dare say you will come."

"Fast enough," said Mary, cheerily, as if all was settled. In
contrast with her present surroundings, the prospect was more
than attractive. "--But would you let me have my piano?" she
asked, with sudden apprehension.

"You shall have my grand piano always when I am out, which will
be every night in the season, I dare say. That will give you
plenty of practice; and you will be able to have the best of
lessons. And think of the concerts and oratorios you will go to!"

As she spoke, the carriage drew up at the door of the shop, and
Mary took her leave. Hesper accepted her acknowledgments in the
proper style of a benefactress, and returned her good-by kindly.
But not yet did she shake hands with her.

Some of my readers may wonder that Mary should for a moment dream
of giving up what they would call her independence; for was she
not on her own ground in the shop of which she was a proprietor?
and was the change proposed, by whatever name it might be called,
anything other than _service_? But they are outside it, and
Mary was in it, and knew how little such an independence was
worth the name. Almost everything about the shop had altered in
its aspect to her. The very air she breathed in it seemed
slavish. Nor was the change in her. The whole thing was growing
more and more sordid, for now--save for her part--the one spirit
ruled it entirely.

The work had therefore more or less grown a drudgery to her. The
spirit of gain was in full blast, and whoever did not trim his
sails to it was in danger of finding it rough weather. No longer
could she, without offense, and consequent disturbance of spirit,
arrange her attendance as she pleased, or have the same time for
reading as before. She could encounter black looks, but she could
not well live with them; and how was she to continue the servant
of such ends as were now exclusively acknowledged in the place?
The proposal of Mrs. Redmain stood in advantageous contrast to
this treadmill-work. In her house she would be called only to the
ministrations of love, and would have plenty of time for books
and music, with a thousand means of growth unapproachable in
Testbridge. All the slavery lay in the shop, all the freedom in
the personal service. But she strove hard to suppress anxiety,
for she saw that, of all poverty-stricken contradictions, a
Christian with little faith is the worst.

The chief attraction to her, however, was simply Hesper herself.
She had fallen in love with her--I hardly know how otherwise to
describe the current with which her being set toward her. Few
hearts are capable of loving as she loved. It was not merely that
she saw in Hesper a grand creature, and lovely to look upon, or
that one so much her superior in position showed such a liking
for herself; she saw in her one she could help, one at least who
sorely needed help, for she seemed to know nothing of what made
life worth having--one who had done, and must yet be capable of
doing, things degrading to the humanity of womanhood. Without the
hope of helping in the highest sense, Mary could not have taken
up her abode in such a house as Mrs. Redmain's. No outward
service of any kind, even to the sick, was to her service enough
to _choose_; were it laid upon her, she would hasten to it;
for necessity is the push, gentle or strong, as the man is more
or less obedient, by which God sends him into the path he would
have him take. But to help to the birth of a beautiful Psyche,
enveloped all in the gummy cerecloths of its chrysalis, not yet
aware, even, that it must get out of them, and spread great wings
to the sunny wind of God--that was a thing for which the holiest
of saints might well take a servant's place--the thing for which
the Lord of life had done it before him. To help out such a
lovely sister--how Hesper would have drawn herself up at the
word! it is mine, not Mary's--as she would be when no longer
holden of death, but her real self, the self God meant her to be
when he began making her, would indeed be a thing worth having
lived for! Between the ordinarily benevolent woman and Mary
Marston, there was about as great a difference as between the
fashionable church-goer and Catherine of Siena. She would be
Hesper's servant that she might gain Hesper. I would not have her
therefore wondered at as a marvel of humility. She was simply a
young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a
real person, such as those represent him who profess to have
known him; and she therefore believed the man himself--believed
that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to
be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he
told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard
any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny
Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was
he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the
Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he,
the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. He gives it
to one to serve as the rich can, to another as the poor must. The
only disgrace, whether of the counting-house, the shop, or the
family, is to think the service degrading. If it be such, why not
sit down and starve rather than do it? No man has a right to
disgrace himself. Starve, I say; the world will lose nothing in
you, for you are its disgrace, who count service degrading. You
are much too grand people for what your Maker requires of you,
and does himself, and yet you do it after a fashion, because you
like to eat and go warm. You would take rank in the kingdom of
hell, not the kingdom of heaven. But obedient love, learned by
the meanest Abigail, will make of her an angel of ministration,
such a one as he who came to Peter in the prison, at whose touch
the fetters fell from the limbs of the apostle.

"What forced, overdriven, Utopian stuff! A kingdom always coming,
and never come! I hold by what _is._ This solid, plowable
earth will serve my turn. My business is what I can find in the
oyster."

I hear you, friend. Your answer will come whence you do not look
for it. For some, their only answer will be the coming of that
which they deny; and the _Presence_ will be a very different
thing to those who desire it and those who do not. In the mean
time, if we are not yet able to serve like God from pure love,
let us do it because it is his way; so shall we come to do it
from pure love also.

The very next morning, as she called it--that is, at four o'clock
in the afternoon--Hesper again entered the shop, and, to the
surprise and annoyance of the master of it, was taken by Mary
through the counter and into the house. "What a false
impression," thought the great man, "will it give of the way
_we_ live, to see the Marstons' shabby parlor in a
warehouse!" But he would have been more astonished and more
annoyed still, had the deafening masses of soft goods that filled
the house permitted him to hear through them what passed between
the two. Before they came down, Mary had accepted a position in
Mrs. Redmain's house, if that may be called a position which was
so undefined; and Hesper had promised that she would not mention
the matter. For Mary judged Mr. Turnbull would be too glad to get
rid of her to mind how brief the notice she gave him, and she
would rather not undergo the remarks that were sure to be made in
contempt of her scheme. She counted it only fair, however, to let
him know that she intended giving up her place behind the
counter, hinting that, as she meant to leave when it suited her
without further warning, it would be well to look out at once for
one to take her place.

As to her money in the business, she scarcely thought of it, and
said nothing about it, believing it as safe as in the bank. It
was in the power of a dishonest man who prided himself on his
honesty--the worst kind of rogue in the creation; but she had not
yet learned to think of him as a dishonest man--only as a greedy
one--and the money had been there ever since she had heard of
money. Mr. Turnbull was so astonished by her communication that,
not seeing at once how the change was likely to affect him, he
held his peace--with the cunning pretense that his silence arose
from anger. His first feeling was of pleasure, but the man of
business must take care how he shows himself pleased. On
reflection, he continued pleased; for, as they did not seem
likely to succeed in securing Mary in the way they had wished,
the next best thing certainly would be to get rid of her.
Perhaps, indeed, it was the very best thing; for it would be easy
to get George a wife more suitable to the position of his family
than a little canting dissenter, and her money would be in their
hands all the same; while, once clear of her haunting cat-eyes,
ready to pounce upon whatever her soft-headed father had taught
her was wicked, he could do twice the business. But, while he
continued pleased, he continued careful not to show his
satisfaction, for she would then go smelling about for the cause!
During three whole days, therefore, he never spoke to her. On the
fourth, he spoke as if nothing had ever been amiss between them,
and showed some interest in her further intentions. But Mary, in
the straightforward manner peculiar to herself, told him she
preferred not speaking of them at present; whereupon the cunning
man concluded that she wanted a place in another shop, and was on
the outlook--prepared to leave the moment one should turn up.

She asked him one day whether he had yet found a person to take
her place.

"Time enough for that," he answered. "You're not gone yet."

"As you please, Mr. Turnbull," said Mary. "It was merely that I
should be sorry to leave you without sufficient help in the
shop."

"And _I_ should be sorry," rejoined Turnbull, "that Miss
Marston should fancy herself indispensable to the business she
turned her back upon."

From that moment, the restraint he had for the last week or two
laid upon himself thus broken through, he never spoke to her
except with such rudeness that she no longer ventured to address
him even on shop-business; and all the people in the place,
George included, following the example so plainly set them, she
felt, when, at last, in the month of November, a letter from
Hesper heralded the hour of her deliverance, that to take any
formal leave would be but to expose herself to indignity. She
therefore merely told Turnbull, one evening as he left the shop,
that she would not be there in the morning, and was gone from
Testbridge before it was opened the next day.




CHAPTER XXIV.

MRS. REDMAIN'S DRAWING-ROOM.


A few years ago, a London drawing-room was seldom beautiful; but
size is always something, and, if Mrs. Redmain's had not harmony,
it had gilding--a regular upholsterer's drawing-room it was, on
which about as much taste had been expended as on the fattening
of a prize-pig. Happily there is as little need as temptation to
give any description of it, with its sheets of glass and steel,
its lace curtains, crude-colored walls and floor and couches, and
glittering chandeliers of a thousand prisms. Everybody knows the
kind of room--a huddle of the chimera ambition wallowing in the
chaos of the commonplace--no miniature world of harmonious
abiding. The only interesting thing in it was, that on all sides
were doors, which must lead out of it, and might lead to a better
place.

It was about eleven o'clock of a November morning--more like one
in March. There might be a thick fog before the evening, but now
the sun was shining like a brilliant lump of ice--so inimical to
heat, apparently, that a servant had just dropped the venetian
blind of one of the windows to shut his basilisk-gaze from the
sickening fire, which was now rapidly recovering. Betwixt the
cold sun and the hard earth, a dust-befogged wind, plainly
borrowed from March, was sweeping the street.

Mr. and Mrs. Redmain had returned to town thus early because
their country-place was in Cornwall, and there Mr. Redmain was
too far from his physician. He was now considerably better,
however, and had begun to go about again, for the weather did not
yet affect him much. He was now in his study, as it was called,
where he generally had his breakfast alone. Mrs. Redmain always
had hers in bed, as often with a new novel as she could, of which
her maid cut the leaves, and skimmed the cream. But now she was
descending the stair, straight as a Greek goddess, and about as
cold as the marble she is made of--mentally rigid, morally
imperturbable, and vacant of countenance to a degree hardly
equaled by the most ordinary of goddesses. She entered the
drawing-room with a slow, careless, yet stately step, which
belonged to her, I can not say by nature, for it was not natural,
but by ancestry. She walked to the chimney, seated herself in a
low, soft, shiny chair almost on the hearth-rug, and gazed
listlessly into the fire. In a minute she rose and rang the bell.

"Send my maid, and shut the door," she said.

The woman came.

"Has Miss Yolland left her room yet?" she asked.

"No, ma'am."

"Let her know I am in the drawing-room."

This said, she resumed her fire-gazing.

There was not much to see in the fire, for the fire is but a
reflector, and there was not much behind the eyes that looked
into it for that fire to reflect. Hesper was no dreamer--the more
was the pity, for dreams are often the stuff out of which actions
are made. Had she been a truer woman, she might have been a
dreamer, but where was the space for dreaming in a life like
hers, without heaven, therefore without horizon, with so much
room for desiring, and so little room for hope? The buz that
greeted her entrance of a drawing-room, was the chief joy she
knew; to inhabit her well-dressed body in the presence of other
well-dressed bodies, her highest notion of existence. And even
upon these hung ever as an abating fog the consciousness of
having a husband. I can not say she was tired of marriage, for
she had loathed her marriage from the first, and had not found it
at all better than her expectation: she had been too ignorant to
forebode half its horrors.

Education she had had but little that was worth the name, for she
had never been set growing; and now, although well endowed by
nature, she was gradually becoming stupid. People who have plenty
of money, and neither hope nor aspiration, must become stupid,
except indeed they hate, and then for a time the devil in them
will make them a sort of clever.

Miss Yolland came undulating. No kiss, no greeting whatever
passed between the ladies. Sepia began at once to rearrange a few
hot-house flowers on the mantel-piece, looking herself much like
some dark flower painted in an old missal.

"This day twelve months!" said Hesper.

"I know," returned Sepia.

"If one could die without pain, and there was nothing to come
after!" said Hesper. "What a tiresome dream it is!"

"Dream, or nightmare, or what you will, you had better get all
you can out of it before you break it," said Sepia.

"You seem to think it worth keeping!" yawned Hesper.

Sepia smiled, with her face to the glass, in which she saw the
face of her cousin with her eyes on the fire; but she made no
answer. Hesper went on.

"Ah!" she said, "your story is not mine. You are free; I am a
slave. You are alive; I am in my coffin."

"That's marriage," said Sepia, dryly.

"It would not matter much," continued Hesper, "if you could have
your coffin to yourself; but when you have to share it--ugh!"

"If I were you, then," said Sepia, "I would not lie still; I
would get up and bite--I mean, be a vampire."

Hesper did not answer. Sepia turned from the mirror, looked at
her, and burst into a laugh--at least, the sound she made had all
the elements of a laugh--except the merriment.

"Now really, Hesper, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," she
cried. "You to put on the pelican and the sparrow, with all the
world before you, and all the men in it at your feet!"

"A pack of fools!" remarked Hesper, with a calmness which in
itself was scorn. "I don't deny it--but amusing fools--you must
allow that!"

"They don't amuse me."

"That's your fault: you won't be amused. The more foolish they
are, the more amusing I find them."

"I am sick of it all. Nothing amuses me. How can it, when there
is nothing behind it? You can't live on amusement. It is the
froth on water an inch deep, and then the mud!"

"I declare, misery makes a poetess of you! But as to the mud, I
don't mind a little mud. It is only dirt, and has its part in the
inevitable peck, I hope."

"_I_ don't mind mud so long as you can keep out of it. But
when one is over head and ears in it, I should like to know what
life is worth," said Hesper, heedless that the mud was of her own
making. "I declare, Sepia," she went on, drawling the
declaration, "if I were to be asked whether I would go on or not--"

"You would ask a little time to make up your mind, Hesper, I
fancy," suggested Sepia, for Hesper had paused. As she did not
reply, Sepia resumed.

"Which is your favorite poison, Hesper?" she said.

"When I choose, it will be to use," replied Hesper.

"Rhyming, at last!" said Sepia.

But Hesper would not laugh, and her perfect calmness checked the
laughter which would have been Sepia's natural response: she was
careful not to go too far.

"Do you know, Hesper," she said, with seriousness, "what is the
matter with you?"

"Tolerably well," answered Hesper.

"You do not--let me tell you. You are nothing but a baby yet. You
have no heart."

"If you mean that I have never been in love, you are right. But
you talk foolishly; for you know that love is no more within my
reach than if I were the corpse I feel."

Sepia pressed her lips together, and nodded knowingly; then,
after a moment's pause, said:

"When your hour is come, you will understand. Every woman's hour
comes, one time or another--whether she will or not."

"Sepia, if you think that, because I hate my husband, I would
allow another man to make love to me, you do not know me yet."

"I know you very well; you do not know yourself, Hesper; you do
not know the heart of a woman--because your own has never come
awake yet."

"God forbid it ever should, then--so long as--as the man I hate
is alive!"

Sepia laughed.

"A good prayer," she said; "for who can tell what you might do to
him!"

"Sepia, I sometimes think you are a devil."

"And I sometimes think you are a saint."

"What do you take me for the other times?"

"A hypocrite. What do _you_ take _me_ for the other
times?"

"No hypocrite," answered Hesper.

With a light, mocking laugh, Sepia turned away, and left the
room.

Hesper did not move. If stillness indicates thought, then Hesper
was thinking; and surely of late she had suffered what might have
waked something like thought in what would then have been
something like a mind: all the machinery of thought was there--
sorely clogged, and rusty; but for a woman to hate her husband is
hardly enough to make a thinking creature of her. True as it was,
there was no little affectation in her saying what she did about
the worthlessness of her life. She was plump and fresh; her eye
was clear, her hand firm and cool; suffering would have to go a
good deal deeper before it touched in her the issues of life, or
the love of it. What set her talking so, was in great part the
_ennui_ of endeavor after enjoyment, and the reaction from
success in the pursuit. Her low moods were, however, far more
frequent than, even with such fatigue and reaction to explain
them, belonged to her years, her health, or her temperament.

The fire grew hot. Hesper thought of her complexion, and pushed
her chair back. Then she rose, and, having taken a hand-screen
from the chimney-piece, was fanning herself with it, when the
door opened, and a servant asked if she were at home to Mr.
Helmer. She hesitated a moment: what an unearthly hour for a
caller!

"Show him up," she answered: anything was better than her own
company.

Tom Helmer entered--much the same--a little paler and thinner. He
made his approach with a certain loose grace natural to him, and
seated himself on the chair, at some distance from her own, to
which Mrs. Redmain motioned him.

Tom seldom failed of pleasing. He was well dressed, and not too
much; and, to the natural confidence of his shallow character,
added the assurance born of a certain small degree of success in
his profession, which he took for the pledge of approaching
supremacy. He carried himself better than he used, and his legs
therefore did not look so long. His hair continued to curl soft
and silky about his head, for he protested against the
fashionable convict-style. His hat was new, and he bore it in
front of him like a ready apology.

It was to no presentableness of person, however, any more than to
previous acquaintance, that Tom now owed his admittance. True, he
had been to Durnmelling not unfrequently, but that was in the
other world of the country, and even there Hesper had taken no
interest in the self-satisfied though not ill-bred youth who went
galloping about the country, showing off to rustic girls. It was
merely, as I have said, that she could no longer endure a
_tete-a-tete_ with one she knew so little as herself, and
whose acquaintance she was so little desirous of cultivating.

Tom had been to a small party at the house a few evenings before,
brought thither by the well-known leader of a certain literary
clique, who, in return for homage, not seldom, took younger
aspirants under a wing destined never to be itself more than
half-fledged. It was, notwithstanding, broad enough already so to
cover Tom with its shadow that under it he was able to creep into
several houses of a sort of distinction, and among them into Mrs.
Redmain's.

Nothing of less potency than the presumption attendant on self-
satisfaction could have emboldened him to call thus early, and
that in the hope not merely of finding Mrs. Redmain at home, but
of finding her alone; and, with the not unusual reward of
unworthy daring, he had succeeded. He was ambitious of making
himself acceptable to ladies of social influence, and of being
known to stand well with such. In the case of Mrs. Redmain he was
the more anxious, because she had not received him on any footing
of former acquaintance.

At the gathering to which I have referred, a certain song was
sung by a lady, not without previous manoeuvre on the part of
Tom, with which Mrs. Redmain had languidly expressed herself
pleased; that song he had now brought her--for, concerning words
and music both, he might have said with Touchstone, "An ill-
favored thing, but mine own." He did not quote Touchstone because
he believed both words and music superexcellent, the former being
in truth not quite bad, and the latter nearly as good.
Appreciation was the very hunger of Tom's small life, and here
was a chance!

"I ought to apologize," he said, airily, "and I will, if you will
allow me."

Mrs. Redmain said nothing, only waited with her eyes. They were
calm, reposeful eyes, not fixed, scarcely lying upon Tom. It was
chilling, but he was not easily chilled when self was in the
question--as it generally was with Tom. He felt, however, that he
must talk or be lost.

"I have taken the liberty," he said, "of bringing you the song I
had the pleasure--a greater pleasure than you will readily
imagine--of hearing you admire the other evening."

"I forget," said Hesper.

"I would not have ventured," continued Tom, "had it not happened
that both air and words were my own."

"Ah!--indeed!--I did not know you were a poet, Mr.--"

She had forgotten his name.

"That or nothing," answered Tom, boldly.

"And a musician, too?"

"At your service, Mrs. Redmain."

"I don't happen to want a poet at present--or a musician either,"
she said, with just enough of a smile to turn the rudeness into
what Tom accepted as a flattering familiarity.

"Nor am I in want of a place," he replied, with spirit; "a bird
can sing on any branch. Will you allow me to sing this song on
yours? Mrs. Downport scarcely gave the expression I could have
desired.--May I read the voices before I sing them?"

Without either intimacy or encouragement, Tom was capable of
offering to read his own verses! Such fools self-partisanship
makes of us.

Mrs. Redmain was, for her, not a little amused with the young
man; he was not just like every other that came to the house.

"I should li-i-ike," she said.

Tom laid himself back a little in his chair, with the sheet of
music in his hand, closed his eyes, and repeated as follows--he
knew all his own verses by heart:

    "Lovely lady, sweet disdain!
    Prithee keep thy Love at home;
    Bind him with a tressed chain;
    Do not let the mischief roam.

    "In the jewel-cave, thine eye,
    In the tangles of thy hair,
    It is well the imp should lie--
    There his home, his heaven is there.

    "But for pity's sake, forbid
    Beauty's wasp at me to fly;
    Sure the child should not be chid,
    And his mother standing by.

    "For if once the villain came
    To my house, too well I know
    He would set it all aflame--
    To the winds its ashes blow.

    "Prithee keep thy Love at home;
    Net him up or he will start;
    And if once the mischief roam,
    Straight he'll wing him to my heart."

What there might be in verse like this to touch with faintest
emotion, let him say who cultivates art for art's sake. Doubtless
there is that in rhythm and rhyme and cadence which will touch
the pericardium when the heart itself is not to be reached by
divinest harmony; but, whether such women as Hesper feel this
touch or only admire a song as they admire the church-prayers and
Shakespeare, or whether, imagining in it some _tour de
force_ of which they are themselves incapable, they therefore
look upon it as a mighty thing, I am at a loss to determine. All
I know is that a gleam as from some far-off mirror of admiration
did certainly, to Tom's great satisfaction, appear on Hesper's
countenance. As, however, she said nothing, he, to waive aside a
threatening awkwardness, lightly subjoined:

"Queen Anne is all the rage now, you see."

Mrs. Redmain knew that Queen-Anne houses were in fashion, and was
even able to recognize one by its flush window-frames, while she
had felt something odd, which might be old-fashioned, in the
song; between the two, she was led to the conclusion that the
fashion of Queen Anne's time had been revived in the making of
verses also.

"Can you, then, make a song to any pattern you please?" she
asked.

"I fancy so," answered Tom, indifferently, as if it were nothing
to him to do whatever he chose to attempt. And in fact he could
imitate almost anything--and well, too--the easier that he had
nothing of his own pressing for utterance; for he had yet made no
response to the first demand made on every man, the only demand
for originality made on any man--that he should order his own way
aright.

"How clever you must be!" drawled Hesper; and, notwithstanding
the tone, the words were pleasant in the ears of goose Tom. He
rose, opened the piano, and, with not a little cheap facility,
began to accompany a sweet tenor voice in the song he had just
read.

The door opened, and Mr. Redmain came in. He gave a glance at Tom
as he sang, and went up to his wife where she still sat, with her
face to the fire, and her back to the piano.

"New singing-master, eh?" he said.

"No," answered his wife.

"Who the deuce is he?"

"I forget his name," replied Hesper, in the tone of one bored by
question. "He used to come to Durnmelling."

"That is no reason why he should not have a name to him."

Hesper did not reply. Tom went on playing. The moment he struck
the last chord, she called to him in a clear, soft, cold voice:

"Will you tell Mr. Redmain your name? I happen to have forgotten
it."

Tom picked up his hat, rose, came forward, and, mentioning his
name, held out his hand.

"I don't know you," said Mr. Redmain, touching his palm with two
fingers that felt like small fishes.

"It is of no consequence," said his wife; "Mr. Aylmer is an old
acquaintance of our family."

"Only you don't quite remember his name!"

"It is not my _friends'_ names only I have an unhappy trick
of forgetting. I often forget yours, Mr. Redmain!"

"My _good_ name, you must mean."

"I never heard that."

Neither had raised the voice, or spoken with the least apparent
anger.

Mr. Redmain gave a grin instead of a retort. He appreciated her
sharpness too much to get one ready in time. Turning away, he
left the room with a quiet, steady step, taking his grin with
him: it had drawn the clear, scanty skin yet tighter on his face,
and remained fixed; so that he vanished with something of the
look of a hairless tiger.

The moment he disappeared, Tom's gaze, which had been fascinated,
sought Hesper. Her lips were shaping the word _brute!_--Tom
heard it with his eyes; her eyes were flashing, and her face was
flushed. But the same instant, in a voice perfectly calm--

"Is there anything else you would like to sing, Mr. Helmer?" she
said. "Or--" Here she ceased, with the slightest possible
choking--it was only of anger--in the throat.

Tom's was a sympathetic nature, especially where a pretty woman
was in question. He forgot entirely that she had given quite as
good, or as bad, as she received, and was hastening to say
something foolish, imagining he had looked upon the sorrows of a
lovely and unhappy wife and was almost in her confidence, when
Sepia entered the room, with a dark glow that flashed into dusky
radiance at sight of the handsome Tom. She had noted him on the
night of the party, and remembered having seen him at the
merrymaking in the old hall of Durnmelling, but he had not been
introduced to her. A minute more, and they were sitting together
in a bay-window, blazing away at each other like two corvettes,
though their cartridges were often blank enough, while Hesper,
never heeding them, kept her place by the chimney, her gaze
transferred from the fire to the novel she had sent for from her
bedroom.




CHAPTER XXV.

MARY'S RECEPTION.


In the afternoon of the same day, now dreary enough, with the
dreariness naturally belonging to the dreariest month of the
year, Mary arrived in the city preferred to all cities by those
who live in it, but the most uninviting, I should imagine, to a
stranger, of all cities on the face of the earth. Cold seemed to
have taken to itself a visible form in the thin, gray fog that
filled the huge station from the platform to the glass roof. The
latter had vanished, indistinguishable from sky invisible, and
from the brooding darkness, in which the lamps innumerable served
only to make spots of thinness. It was a mist, not a November
fog, properly so called; but every breath breathed by every
porter, as he ran along by the side of the slowly halting train,
was adding to its mass, which seemed to Mary to grow in bulk and
density as she gazed. Her quiet, simple, decided manner at once
secured her attention, and she was among the first who had their
boxes on cabs and were driving away.

But the drive seemed interminable, and she had grown anxious and
again calmed herself many times, before it came to an end. The
house at which the cab drew up was large, and looked as dreary as
large, but scarcely drearier than any other house in London on
that same night of November. The cabman rang the bell, but it was
not until they had waited a time altogether unreasonable that the
door at length opened, and a lofty, well-built footman in livery
appeared framed in it.

Mary got out, and, going up the steps, said she hoped the driver
had brought her to the right house: it was Mrs. Redmain's she
wanted.

"Mrs. Redmain is not at home, miss," answered the man. "I didn't
hear as how she was expecting of any one," he added, with a
glance at the boxes, formlessly visible on the cab, through the
now thicker darkness.

"She is expecting me, I know," returned Mary; "but of course she
would not stay at home to receive me," she remarked, with a
smile.

"Oh!" returned the man, in a peculiar tone, and adding, "I'll
see," went away, leaving her on the top of the steps, with the
cabman behind her, at the bottom of them, waiting orders to get
her boxes down.

"It don't appear as you was overwelcome, miss!" he remarked: with
his comrades on the stand he passed for a wit; "--leastways, it
don't seem as your sheets was quite done hairing."

"It's all right," said Mary, cheerfully.

She was not ready to imagine her dignity in danger, therefore did
not provoke assault upon it by anxiety for its safety.

"I'm sorry to hear it, miss," the man rejoined.

"Why?" she asked.

"'Cause I should ha' liked to ha' taken _you_ farther."

"But why?" said Mary, the second time, not understanding him, and
not unwilling to cover the awkwardness of that slow minute of
waiting.

"Because it gives a poor man with a whole family o' prowocations
some'at of a chance, to 'ave a affable young lady like you, miss,
behind him in his cab, once a year, or thereabouts. It's not by
no means as I'd have you go farther and fare worse, which it's a
sayin' as I've heerd said, miss. So, if you're sure o' the place,
I may as well be a-gettin' down of _your_ boxes."

So saying, he got on the cab, and proceeded to unfasten the chain
that secured the luggage.

"Wait a bit, cabbie. Don't you be in sech a 'urry as if you was a
'ansom, now," cried the footman, reappearing at the farther end
of the hall. "I should be sorry if there was a mistake, and you
wasn't man enough to put your boxes up again without assistance."
Then, turning to Mary, "Mrs. Perkin says, miss--that's the
housekeeper, miss," he went on, "--that, if as you're the young
woman from the country--and I'm sure I beg your pardon if I make
a mistake--it ain't my fault, miss--Mrs. Perkin says she did hear
Mrs. Redmain make mention of one, but she didn't have any
instructions concerning her.--But, as there you are," he
continued more familiarly, gathering courage from Mary's nodded
assent, "you can put your boxes in the hall, and sit down, she
says, till Mrs. R. comes 'ome."

"Do you think she will be long?" asked Mary.

"Well, that's what no fellow can't say, seein' its a new play as
she's gone to. They call it Doomsday, an' there's no tellin' when
parties is likely to come 'ome from that," said the man, with a
grin of satisfaction at his own wit.

Was London such a happy place that everybody in it was given to
joking, thought Mary.

"'Ere, mister! gi' me a 'and wi' this 'ere luggage," cried the
cabman, finding the box he was getting down too much for him.
"Yah wouldn't see me break my back, an' my poor 'orse standin'
there a lookin' on--would ye now?"

"Why don't you bring a man with you?" objected the footman, as he
descended the steps notwithstanding, to give the required
assistance. "I ain't paid as a crane.--By Juppiter! what a weight
the new party's boxes is!"

"Only that one," said Mary, apologetically. "It is full of books.
The other is not half so heavy."

"Oh, it ain't the weight, miss!" returned the footman, who had
not intended she should hear the remark. "I believe Mr. Cabman
and myself will prove equal to the occasion."

With that the book-box came down a great bump on the pavement,
and presently both were in the hall, the one on the top of the
other. Mary paid the cabman, who asked not a penny more than his
fare; he departed with thanks; the facetious footman closed the
door, told her to take a seat, and went away full of laughter, to
report that the young person had brought a large library with her
to enliven the dullness of her new situation.

Mrs. Perkin smiled crookedly, and, in a tone of pleasant reproof,
desired her laughter-compressing inferior not to forget his
manners.

"Please, ma'am, am I to leave the young woman sittin' up there
all by herself in the cold?" he asked, straightening himself up.
"She do look a rayther superior sort of young person," he added,
"and the 'all-stove is dead out."

"For the present, Castle," replied Mrs. Perkin.

She judged it wise to let the young woman have a lesson at once
in subjection and inferiority.

Mrs. Perkin was a rather tall, rather thin, quite straight, and
very dark-complexioned woman. She always threw her head back on
one side and her chin out on the other when she spoke, and had
about her a great deal of the authoritative, which she mingled
with such consideration toward her subordinates as to secure
their obedience to her, while she cultivated antagonism to her
mistress. She had had a better education than most persons of her
class, but was morally not an atom their superior in consequence.
She never went into a new place but with the feeling that she was
of more importance by far than her untried mistress, and the
worthier person of the two. She entered her service, therefore,
as one whose work it was to take care of herself against a woman
whose mistress she ought to have been, had Providence but started
her with her natural rights. At the same time, she would have
been _almost_ as much offended by a hint that she was not a
Christian, as she would have been by a doubt whether she was a
lady. For, indeed, she was both, if a great opinion of herself
constituted the latter, and a great opinion of going to church
constituted the former.

She had not been taken into Hesper's confidence with regard to
Mary, had discovered that "a young person" was expected, but had
learned nothing of what her position in the house was to be. She
welcomed, therefore, this opportunity both of teaching Mrs.
Redmain--she never called her her _mistress_, while severely
she insisted on the other servants' speaking of her so--the
propriety of taking counsel with her housekeeper and of letting
the young person know in time that Mrs. Perkin was in reality her
mistress.

The relation of the upper servants of the house to their
employers was more like that of the managers of an hotel to their
guests. The butler, the lady's-maid, and Mr. Redmain's body-
servant, who had been with him before his marriage, and was
supposed to be deep in his master's confidence, ate with the
housekeeper in her room, waited upon by the livery and maid-
servants, except the second cook: the first cook only came to
superintend the cooking of the dinner, and went away after. To
all these Mrs. Perkin was careful to be just; and, if she was
precise even to severity with them, she was herself obedient to
the system she had established--the main feature of which was
punctuality. She not only regarded punctuality as the foremost of
virtues, but, in righteous moral sequence, made it the first of
her duties; and the benefit everybody reaped. For nothing oils
the household wheels so well as this same punctuality. In a
family, love, if it be strong, genuine, and patent, will make up
for anything; but, where there is no family and no love, the loss
of punctuality will soon turn a house into the mere pouch of a
social _inferno_. Here the master and mistress came and
went, regardless of each other, and of all household polity; but
their meals were ready for them to the minute, when they chose to
be there to eat them; the carriage came round like one of the
puppets on the Strasburg clock; the house was quiet as a
hospital; the bells were answered--all except the door-bell
outside of calling hours--with swiftness; you could not soil your
fingers anywhere--not even if the sweep had been that same
morning; the manners of the servants--_when serving_--were
unexceptionable; but the house was scarcely more of a home than
one of the huge hotels characteristic of the age.

In the hall of it sat Mary for the space of an hour, not exactly
learning the lesson Mrs. Perkin had intended to teach her, but
learning more than one thing Mrs. Perkin was not yet capable of
learning. I can not say she was comfortable, for she was both
cold and hungry; but she was far from miserable. She had no small
gift of patience, and had taught herself to look upon the less
troubles of life as on a bad dream. There are children, though
not yet many, capable, through faith in their parents, of
learning not a little by their experience, and Mary was one of
such; from the first she received her father's lessons like one
whose business it was to learn them, and had thereby come to
learn where he had himself learned. Hence she was not one to say
_our Father in heaven_, and act as if there were no such
Father, or as if he cared but little for his children. She was
even foolish enough to believe that that Father both knew and
cared that she was hungry and cold and wearily uncomfortable; and
thence she was weak enough to take the hunger and cold and
discomfort as mere passing trifles, which could not last a moment
longer than they ought. From her sore-tried endeavors after
patience, had grown the power of active waiting--and a genuinely
waiting child is one of the loveliest sights the earth has to
show.

This was not the reception she had pictured to herself, as the
train came rushing from Testbridge to London; she had not,
indeed, imagined a warm one, but she had not expected to be
forgotten--for so she interpreted her abandonment in the hall,
which seemed to grow colder every minute. She saw no means of
reminding the household of her neglected presence, and indeed
would rather have remained where she was till the morning than
encounter the growing familiarity of the man who had admitted
her. She did think once--if Mrs. Redmain were to hear of her
reception, how she would resent it! and would have found it
difficult to believe how far people like her are from troubling
themselves about the behavior of their servants to other people;
for they have no idea of an obligation to rule their own house,
neither seem to have a notion of being accountable for what goes
on in it.

She had grown very weary, and began to long for a floor on which
she might stretch herself; there was not a sound in the house but
the ticking of a clock somewhere; and she was now wondering
whether everybody had gone to bed, when she heard a step
approaching, and presently Castle, who was the only man at home,
stood up before her, and, with the ease of perfect self-
satisfaction, and as if there was nothing in the neglect of her
but the custom of the house to cool people well in the hall
before admitting them to its penetralia, said, "Step this way--
miss"; the last word added after a pause of pretended hesitation,
for the man had taken his cue from the housekeeper.

Mary rose, and followed him to the basement story, into a
comfortable room, where sat Mrs. Perkin, embroidering large
sunflowers on a piece of coarse stuff. She was _artistic_,
and despised the whole style of the house.

"You may sit down," she said, and pointed to a chair near the
door.

Mary, not a little amused, for all her discomfort, did as she was
permitted, and awaited what should come next.

"What part of the country are you from?" asked Mrs. Perkin, with
her usual diagonal upward toss of the chin, but without lifting
her eyes from her work.

"From Testbridge," answered Mary.

"The servants in this house are in the habit of saying _ma'am_
to their superiors: it is required of them," remarked Mrs. Perkin.
But, although her tone was one of rebuke, she said the
words lightly, tossed the last of them off, indeed, almost
playfully, as if the lesson was meant for one who could hardly
have been expected to know better. "And what place did you
apply for in the house?" she went on to ask.

"I can hardly say, ma'am," answered Mary, avoiding both
inflection and emphasis, and by her compliance satisfying Mrs.
Perkin that she had been right in requiring the _kotou_. "It
is not usual for young persons to be engaged without knowing for
what purpose."

"I suppose not, ma'am."

"What wages were you to have?" next inquired Mrs. Perkin,
gradually assuming a more decided drawl as she became more
assured of her position with the stranger. She would gladly get
some light on the affair. "You need not object to mentioning
them," she went on, for she imagined Mary hesitated, whereas she
was only a little troubled to keep from laughing; "I always pay
the wages myself."

"There was nothing said about wages, ma'am," answered Mary.

"Indeed! Neither work nor wages specified? Excuse me if I say it
seems rather peculiar.--We must be content to wait a little,
then--until we learn what Mrs. Redmain expected of you, _and
whether or not you are capable of it_. We can go no further
now."

"Certainly not, ma'am," assented Mary.

"Can you use your needle?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Have you done any embroidery?"

"I understand it a little, but I am not particularly fond of it."

"You mistake: I did not ask you whether you were fond of it,"
said Mrs. Perkin; "I asked you if you had ever done any"; and she
smiled severely, but ludicrously, for a diagonal smile is apt to
have a comic effect. "Here!--take off your gloves," she
continued, "and let me see you do one of these loose-worked
sunflowers. They are the fashion now, though. I dare say, you
will not be able to see the beauty of them."

"Please, ma'am," returned Mary, "if you will excuse me, I would
rather go to my room. I have had a long journey, and am very
tired."

"There is no room yours.--I have had no character with you.--
Nothing can be done til Mrs. Redman comes home, and she and I
have had a little talk about you. But you can go to the
housemaid's--the second housemaid's room, I mean--and make
yourself tidy. There is a spare bed in it, I believe, which you
can have for the night; only mind you don't keep the girl awake
talking to her, or she will be late in the morning, and that I
never put up with. I think you will do. You seem willing to
learn, and that is half the battle."

Therewith Mrs. Perkin, believing she had laid in awe the
foundation of a rightful authority over the young person, gave
her a nod of dismissal, which she intended to be friendly.

"Please, ma'am," said Mary, "could I have one of my boxes taken
up stairs?"

"Certainly not. I can not have two movings of them; I must take
care of my men. And your boxes, I understand, are heavy, quite
absurdly so. It would _look_ better in a young person not to
have so much to carry about with her."

"I have but two boxes, ma'am," said Mary.

"Full of _books_, I am told."

"One of them only."

"You must do your best without them to-night. When I have made up
my mind what is to be done with you, I shall let you have the one
with your clothes; the other shall be put away in the box-room. I
give my people what books I think fit. For light reading, the
'Fireside Herald' is quite enough for the room.--There--good
night!"

Mary courtesied, and left her. At the door she glanced this way
and that to find some indication to guide her steps. A door was
open at the end of a passage, and from the odor that met her, it
seemed likely to be that of the kitchen. She approached, and
peeped in.

"Who is that?" cried a voice irate.

It was the voice of the second cook, who was there supreme except
when the _chef_ was present. Mary stepped in, and the woman
advanced to meet her.

"May I ask to what I am indebted for the honner of this
unexpected visit?" said the second cook, whose head its
overcharge of self-importance jerked hither and thither upon her
neck, as she seized the opportunity of turning to her own use a
sentence she had just read in the "Fireside Herald" which had
taken her fancy--spoken by Lady Blanche Rivington Delaware to a
detested lover disinclined to be dismissed.

"Would you please tell me where to find the second house-maid,"
said Mary. "Mrs. Perkin has sent me to her room."

"Why don't Mrs. Perkin show you the way, then?" returned the
woman. "There ain't nobody else in the house as I knows on fit to
send to the top o' them stairs with you. A nice way Jemim' 'ill
be in when _she_ comes 'ome, to find a stranger in her
room!"

The same instant, however, the woman bethought herself that, if
what she had said in her haste were reported, it would be as much
as her place was worth; and at once thereupon she assumed a more
complaisant tone. Casting a look at her saucepans, as if to warn
them concerning their behavior in her absence, she turned again
to Mary, saying:

"I believe I better show you the way myself. It's easier to take
you than find a girl to do it. Them hussies is never where they
oughto be! _You_ follow _me_."

She led the way along two passages, and up a back staircase of
stone--up and up, till Mary, unused to such heights, began to be
aware of knees. Plainly at last in the regions of the roof, she
thought her hill Difficulty surmounted, but the cook turned a
sharp corner, and Mary following found herself once more at the
foot of a stair--very narrow and steep, leading up to one of
those old-fashioned roof-turrets which had begun to appear in the
new houses of that part of London.

"Are you taking me to the clouds, cook?" she said, willing to be
cheerful, and to acknowledge her obligation for laborious
guidance.

"Not yet a bit, I hope," answered the cook; "we'll get there soon
enough, anyhow--excep' you belong to them peculiars as wants to
be saints afore their time. If that's your sort, don't you come
here; for a wickeder 'ouse, or an 'ouse as you got to work harder
in o' Sundays, no one won't easily find in this here west end."

With these words she panted up the last few steps, immediately at
the top of which was the room sought. It was a very small one,
scarcely more than holding the two beds. Having lighted the gas,
the cook left her; and Mary, noting that one of the beds was not
made up, was glad to throw herself upon it. Covering herself with
her cloak, her traveling-rug, and the woolen counterpane, she was
soon fast asleep.

She was roused by a cry, half of terror, half of surprise. There
stood the second housemaid, who, having been told nothing of her
room-fellow, stared and gasped.

"I am sorry to have startled you," said Mary, who had half risen,
leaning on her elbow. "They ought to have told you there was a
stranger in your room."

The girl was not long from the country, and, in the midst of the
worst vulgarity in the world, namely, among the servants of the
selfish, her manners had not yet ceased to be simple. For a
moment, however, she seemed capable only of panting, and pressing
her hand on her heart.

"I am very sorry," said Mary, again; "but you see I won't hurt
you! I don't look dangerous, do I?"

"No, miss," answered the girl, with an hysterical laugh. "I been
to the play, and there was a man in it was a thief, you know,
miss!" And with that she burst out crying.

It was some time before Mary got her quieted, but, when she did,
the girl was quite reasonable. She deplored that the bed was not
made up, and would willingly have yielded hers; she was sorry she
had not a clean night-gown to offer her--"not that it would be
fit for the likes of _you_, miss!"--and showed herself full
of friendly ministration. Mary being now without her traveling-
cloak, Jemima judged from her dress she must be some grand
visitor's maid, vastly her superior in the social scale: if she
had taken her for an inferior, she would doubtless, like most,
have had some airs handy.




CHAPTER XXVI.

HER POSITION.


Mary seemed to have but just got to sleep again, when she was
startled awake by the violent ringing of a bell, almost at her
ear.

"Oh, you needn't trouble yet a long while, miss!" said the girl,
who was already dressing. "I've got ever so many fires to light,
ere there'll be a thought of you!"

Mary lay down again, and once more fell fast asleep.

She was waked the third time by the girl telling her that
breakfast was ready; whereupon she rose, and made herself as tidy
as she could, while Jemima _cleaned herself up a bit,_ and
was not a little improved in the process.

"I thought," she said, "as Mrs. Perkin would 'a' as't you to your
first meal with her; but she told me, when I as't what were to be
done with you, as how you must go to the room, and eat your
breakfast with the rest of us."

"As Mrs. Perkin pleases," said Mary.

She had before this come to understand the word of her Master,
that not what enters into a man defiles him, but only what comes
out of him; hence, that no man's dignity is affected by what
another does to him, but only by what he does, or would like to
do, himself.

She did, however, feel a little shy on entering "the room," where
all the livery and most of the women servants were already seated
at breakfast. Two of the men, with a word to each other, made
room for her between them, and laughed; but she took no notice,
and seated herself at the bottom of the table with her companion.
Everything was as clean and tidy as heart could wish, and Mary
was glad enough to make a good meal.

For a few minutes there was loud talking--from a general impulse
to show off before the stranger; then fell a silence, as if some
feeling of doubt had got among them. The least affected by it was
the footman who had opened the door to her: he had witnessed her
reception by Mrs. Perkin. Addressing her boldly, he expressed a
hope that she was not too much fatigued by her journey. Mary
thanked him in her own natural, straightforward way, and the
consequence was, that, when he spoke to her next, he spoke like a
gentleman--in the tone natural to him, that is, and in the
language of the parlor, without any mock-politeness. And,
although the way they talked among themselves made Mary feel as
if she were in a strange country, with strange modes, not of
living merely, but of feeling and of regarding, she received not
the smallest annoyance during the rest of the meal--which did not
last long: Mrs. Perkin took care of that.

For an hour or more, after the rest had scattered to their
respective duties, she was left alone. Then Mrs. Perkin sent for
her.

When she entered her room, she found her occupied with the cook,
and was allowed to stand unnoticed.

"When shall I be able to see Mrs. Redmain, ma'am?" she asked,
when the cook at length turned to go.

"Wait," rejoined Mrs. Perkin, with a quiet dignity, well copied,
"until you are addressed, young woman."--Then first casting a
glance at her, and perhaps perceiving on her countenance a
glimmer of the amusement Mary felt, she began to gather a more
correct suspicion of the sort of being she might possibly be, and
hastily added, "Pray, take a seat."

The idea of making a blunder was unendurable to Mrs. Perkin, and
she was most unwilling to believe she had done so; but, even if
she had, to show that she knew it would only be to render it the
more difficult to recover her pride of place. An involuntary
twinkle about the corners of Mary's mouth made her hasten to
answer her question.

"I am sorry," she said, "that I can give you no prospect of an
interview with Mrs. Redmain before three o'clock. She will very
likely not be out of her room before one.--I suppose you saw her
at Durnmelling?"

"Yes, ma'am," answered Mary, "--and at Testbridge."

It kept growing on the housekeeper that she had made a mistake--
though to what extent she sought in vain to determine.

"You will find it rather wearisome waiting," she said next; "--
would you not like to help me with my work?"

Already she had the sunflowers under her creative hands.

"I should be very glad--if I can do it well enough to please you,
ma'am," answered Mary. "But," she added, "would you kindly see
that Mrs. Redmain is told, as soon as she wakes, that I am here?"

"Oblige me by ringing the bell," said Mrs. Perkin.--"Send Mrs.
Folter here."'

A rather cross-looking, red-faced, thin woman appeared, whom she
requested to let her mistress know, as soon as was proper, that
there was a young person in the house who said she had come from
Testbridge by appointment to see her.

"Yes, ma'am," said Folter, with a supercilious yet familiar nod
to Mary; "I'll take care she knows."

Mary passed what would have been a dreary morning to one
dependent on her company. It was quite three o'clock when she was
at length summoned to Mrs. Redmain's boudoir. Folter, who was her
guide thither, lingered, in the soft closing of the door, long
enough to learn that her mistress received the young person with
a kiss--almost as much to Mary's surprise as Folter's annoyance,
which annoyance partly to relieve, partly to pass on to Mrs.
Perkin, whose reception of Mary she had learned, Folter hastened
to report the fact, and succeeded thereby in occasioning no small
uneasiness in the bosom of the housekeeper, who was almost as
much afraid of her mistress as the other servants were of
herself. Some time she spent in expectant trepidation, but
gradually, as nothing came of it, calmed her fears, and concluded
that her behavior to Mary had been quite correct, seeing the girl
had made it no ground of complaint.

But, although Hesper, being at the moment in tolerable spirits,
in reaction from her depression of the day before, received Mary
with a kiss, she did not ask her a question about her journey, or
as to how she had spent the night. She was there, and looking all
right, and that was enough. On the other hand, she did proceed to
have her at once properly settled.

The little room appointed her looked upon a small court or yard,
and was dark, but otherwise very comfortable. As soon as she was
left to herself, she opened her boxes, put her things away in
drawers and wardrobe, arranged her books within easy reach of the
low chair Hesper had sent for from the drawing-room for her, and
sat down to read a little, brood a little, and build a few
castles in the air, more lovely than evanescent: no other house
is so like its builder as this sort of castle.

About eight o'clock, Folter summoned her to go to Mrs. Redmain.
By this time she was tired: she was accustomed to tea in the
afternoon, and since her dinner with the housekeeper she had had
nothing.

She found Mrs. Redmain dressed for the evening. As soon as Mary
entered, she dismissed Folter.

"I am going out to dinner," she said. "Are you quite
comfortable?"

"I am rather cold, and should like some tea," said Mary.

"My poor girl! have you had no tea?" said Hesper, with some
concern, and more annoyance. "You are looking quite pale, I see!
When did you have anything to eat?"

"I had a good dinner at one o'clock," replied Mary, with a rather
weary smile.

"This is dreadful!" said Hesper. "What can the servants be
about!"

"And, please, may I have a little fire?" begged Mary.

"Certainly," replied Hesper, knitting her brows with a look of
slight anguish. "Is it possible you have been sitting all day
without one? Why did you not ring the bell?" She took one of her
hands. "You are frozen!" she said.

"Oh, no!" answered Mary; "I am far from that. You see nobody
knows yet what to do with me.--You hardly know yourself," she
added, with a merry look. "But, if you wouldn't mind telling Mrs.
Perkin where you wish me to have my meals, that would put it all
right, I think."

"Very well," said Hesper, in a tone that for her was sharp. "Will
you ring the bell?"

She sent for the housekeeper, who presently appeared--lank and
tall, with her head on one side like a lamp-post in distress, but
calm and prepared--a dumb fortress, with a live garrison.

"I wish you, Mrs. Perkin, to arrange with Miss Marston about her
meals."

"Yes, ma'am," answered Mrs. Perkin, with sedatest utterance.

"Mrs. Perkin," said Mary, "I don't want to be troublesome; tell
me what will suit you best."

But Mrs. Perkin did not even look at her; standing straight as a
rush, she kept her eyes on her mistress.

"Do you desire, ma'am, that Miss Marston should have her meals in
the housekeeper's room?" she asked.

"That must be as Miss Marston pleases," answered Hesper. "If she
prefer them in her own, you will see they are properly sent up."

"Very well, ma'am!--Then I wait Miss Marston's orders," said Mrs.
Perkin, and turned to leave the room. But, when her mistress
spoke again, she turned again and stood. It was Mary, however,
whom Hesper addressed.

"Mary," she said, apparently foreboding worse from the tone of
the housekeeper's obedience than from her occurred neglect, "when
I am alone, you shall take your meals with me; and when I have
any one with me, Mrs. Perkin will see that they are sent to your
room. We will settle it so."

"Thank you," said Mary.

"Very well, ma'am," said Mrs. Perkin.

"Send Miss Marston some tea directly," said Hesper.

Scarcely was Mrs. Perkin gone when the brougham was announced.
Mary returned to her room, and in a little while tea, with thin
bread and butter in limited quantity, was brought her. But it was
brought by Jemima, whose face wore a cheerful smile over the tray
she carried: she, at least, did not grudge Mary her superior
place in the household.

"Do you think, Jemima," asked Mary, "you could manage to answer
my bell when I ring?"

"I should only be too glad, miss; it would be nothing but a
pleasure to me; and I'd jump to it if I was in the way; but if I
was up stairs, which this house ain't a place to hear bells in,
sure I am nobody would let me know as you was a-ringin'; and if
you was to think as how I was giving of myself airs, like some
people not far out of this square, I should be both sorry and
ashamed--an' that's more'n I'd say for my place to Mrs. Perkin,
miss."

"You needn't be afraid of that, Jemima," returned Mary. "If you
don't answer when I ring, I shall know, as well as if you told
me, that you either don't hear or can't come at the moment. I
sha'n't be exacting."

"Don't you be afeared to ring, miss; I'll answer your bell as
often as I hear it."

"Could you bring me a loaf? I have had nothing since Mrs.
Perkin's dinner; and this bread and butter is rather too
delicately cut," said Mary.

"Laws, miss, you must be nigh clemmed!" said the girl; and,
hastening away, she soon returned with a loaf, and butter, and a
pot of marmalade sent by the cook, who was only too glad to open
a safety-valve to her pleasure at the discomfiture of Mrs.
Perkin.

"When would you like your breakfast, miss?" asked Jemima, as she
removed the tea-things.

"Any time convenient," replied Mary.

"It's much the same to me, miss, so it's not before there's
bilin' water. You'll have it in bed, miss?"

"No, thank you. I never do."

"You'd better, miss."

"I could not think of it."

"It makes no more trouble--less, miss, than if I had to get it
when the room-breakfast was on. I've got to get the things
together anyhow; and why shouldn't you have it as well as Mrs.
Perkin, or that ill-tempered cockatoo, Mrs. Folter? You're a
lady, and that's more'n can be said for either of them--justly,
that is."

"You don't mean," said Mary, surprised out of her discretion,
"that the housekeeper and the lady's-maid have breakfast in bed?"

"It's every blessed mornin' as I've got to take it up to 'em,
miss, upon my word of honor, with a soft-biled egg, or a box o'
sardines, new-opened, or a slice o' breakfast bacon, streaky. An'
I do _not_ think as it belongs proper to my place; only you
see, miss, the kitchen-maid has got to do it for the cook, an' if
I don't, who is there? It's not them would let the scullery-maid
come near them in their beds."

"Does Mrs. Perkin know that the cook and the lady's-maid have it
as well as herself?"

"Not she, miss; she'd soon make their coffee too 'ot! She's the
only lady down stairs--she is! No more don't Mrs. Folter know as
the cook has hers, only, if she did, it wouldn't make no differ,
for she daren't tell. And cook, to be sure, it ain't her
breakfast, only a cup o' tea an' a bit o' toast, to get her heart
up first."

"Well," said Mary, "I certainly shall not add another to the
breakfasts in bed. But I must trouble you all the same to bring
it me here. I will make my bed, and do out the room myself, if
you will come and finish it off for me."

"Oh, no, indeed, miss, you mustn't do that! Think what they'd say
of you down stairs! They'd despise you downright!"

"I shall do it, Jemima. If they were servants of the right sort,
I should like to have their good opinion, and they would think
all the more of me for doing my share; as it is, I should count
it a disgrace to care a straw, what they thought. We must do our
work, and not mind what people say."

"Yes, miss, that's what my mother used to say to my father, when
he wouldn't be reasonable. But I must go, miss, or I shall catch
it for gossiping with you--that's what _she'll_ call it."

When Jemima was gone, Mary fell a-thinking afresh. It was all
very well, she said to herself, to talk about doing her work, but
here she was with scarce a shadow of an idea what her work was!
Had _any_ work been given her to do in this house? Had she
presumed in coming--anticipated the guidance of Providence, and
was she therefore now where she had no right to be? She could not
tell; but, anyhow, here she was, and no one could be anywhere
without the fact involving its own duty. Even if she had put
herself there, and was to blame for being there, that did not
free her from the obligations of the position, and she was
willing to do whatever should _now_ be given her to do. God
was not a hard master; if she had made a mistake, he would pardon
her, and either give her work here, where she found herself, or
send her elsewhere. I need not say that thinking was not all her
care; for she thought in the presence of Him who, because he is
always setting our wrong things right, is called God our Saviour.




CHAPTER XXVII.

MR. AND MRS. HELMER


The next morning, Mary set out to find Letty, from whom, as I
have said, she had heard but twice since her marriage. Mary had
written again about a month ago, but had had no reply. The sad
fact was, that, ever since she left Testbridge, Letty, for a long
time, without knowing it, had been going down hill. There have
been many whose earnestness has vanished with the presence of
those whose influence awoke it. Letty's better self seemed to
have remained behind with Mary; and not even if he had been as
good as she thought him, could Tom himself have made up to her
for the loss of such a friend.

But Letty had not found marriage at all the grand thing she had
expected. With the faithfulness of a woman, however, she
attributed her disappointment to something inherent in marriage,
nowise affecting the man whom marriage had made her husband.

That he might be near the center to which what little work he did
gravitated, Tom had taken a lodging in a noisy street, as unlike
all that Letty had been accustomed to as anything London, except
in its viler parts, could afford. Never a green thing was to be
looked upon in any direction. Not a sweet sound was to be heard.

The sun, at this time of the year, was seldom to be seen in
London anywhere; and in Lydgate Street, even when there was no
fog, it was but askance, and for a brief portion of the day, that
he shone upon that side where stood their dusty windows. And then
the noise!--a ceaseless torrent of sounds, of stony sounds, of
iron sounds, of grinding sounds, of clashing sounds, of yells and
cries--of all deafening and unpoetic discords! Letty had not much
poetry in her, and needed what could be had from the outside so
much the more. It is the people of a land without springs that
must have cisterns. It is the poetic people without poetry that
pant and pine for the country. When such get hold of a poet, they
expect him to talk poetry, or, at least, to talk about poetry! I
fancy poets do not read much poetry, and except to their peers do
not often care to talk about it. But to one like Letty, however
little she may understand or even be aware of the need, the
poetic is as necessary as rain in summer; while, to one so little
skilled in the finding of it, there was none visible, audible, or
perceptible about her--except, indeed, what, of poorest sort for
her uses, she might discover bottled in some circulating library:
there was one--blessed proximity!--within ten minutes' walk of
her.

Once a week or so, some weeks oftener, Tom would take her to the
play, and that was, indeed, a happiness--not because of the
pleasure of the play only or chiefly, though that was great, but
in the main because she had Tom beside her all the time, and
mixed up Tom with the play, and the play with Tom.

Alas! Tom was not half so dependent upon her, neither derived
half so much pleasure from her company. Some of his evenings
every week he spent at houses where those who received him had
not the faintest idea whether he had a wife or not, and cared as
little, for it would have made no difference: they would not have
invited her. Small, silly, conceited Tom, regarding himself as a
somebody, was more than content to be asked to such people's
houses. He thought he went as a lion, whereas it was merely as a
jackal: so great is the love of some for wild beasts in general,
that they even think something of jackals. He was aware of no
insult to himself in asking him whether as a lion or any other
wild beast, nor of any to his wife and himself together in not
asking her with him. While she sat in her dreary lodging, dingily
clad and lonely, Tom, dressed in the height of the fashion, would
be strolling about grand rooms, now exchanging a flying shot of
recognition, now pausing to pay a compliment to this lady on her
singing, to that on her verses, to a third, where he dared, on
her dress; for good-natured Tom was profuse of compliments, not
without a degree and kind of honesty in them; now singing one of
his own songs to the accompaniment of some gracious goddess, now
accompanying the same or some other gracious goddess as she sang
--for Tom could do that well enough for people without a
conscience in their music; now in the corner of a conservatory,
now in a cozy little third room behind a back drawing-room,
talking nonsense with some lady foolish enough to be amused with
his folly. Tom meant no harm and did not do much--was only a
human butterfly, amusing himself with other creatures of a day,
who have no notion that death can not kill them, or they might
perhaps be more miserable than they are. They think, if they
think at all, that it is life, strong in them, that makes them
forget death; whereas, in truth, it is death, strong in them,
that makes them forget life. Like a hummingbird, all sparkle and
flash, Tom flitted through the tropical delights of such society
as his "uncommon good luck" had gained him admission to, forming
many an evanescent friendship, and taking many a graceful liberty
for which his pleasant looks, confident manners, and free
carriage were his indemnity--for Tom seemed to have been born to
show what a nice sort of a person a fool, well put together, may
be--with his high-bred air, and his ready replies, for he had
also a little of that social element, once highly valued, now
less countenanced, and rare--I mean wit.

He had, indeed, plenty of all sorts of brains; but no amount of
talent could reveal to him the reason or the meaning of the fact
that wedded life was less interesting than courtship; for the
former, the reason lay in himself, and of himself proper he knew,
as I have said, next to nothing; while the latter, the meaning of
the fact, is profound as eternity. He had no notion that, when he
married, his life was thereby, in a lofty and blessed sense,
forfeit; that, to save his wife's life, he must yield his own,
she doing the same for him--for God himself can save no other
way. But the notion of any saving, or the need of it, was far
from Tom; nor had Letty, for her part, any thought of it either,
except from the tyranny of her aunt. Not the less, in truth, did
they both want saving--very much saving--before life could be to
either of them a good thing. It is only its inborn possibility of
and divine tendency toward blossoming that constitute life a good
thing. Life's blossom is its salvation, its redemption, the
justification of its existence--and is a thing far off with most
of us. For Tom, his highest notion of life was to be recognized
by the world for that which he had chosen as his idea of himself
--to have the reviews allow him a poet, not grudgingly, nor with
abatement of any sort, but recognizing him as the genius he must
contrive to believe himself, or "perish in" his "self-contempt."
Then would he live and die in the blessed assurance that his name
would be for over on the lips and in the hearts of that idol of
fools they call _posterity_-divinity as vague as the old
gray Fate, and less noble, inasmuch as it is but the supposed
concave whence is to rebound the man's own opinion of himself.

While jewelly Tom was idling away time which yet could hardly be
called precious, his little brown wife, as I have said, sat at
home--such home as a lodging can be for a wife whose husband
finds his interest mainly outside of it--inquired after by
nobody, thought of by nobody, hardly even taken up by her own
poor, weary self; now trying in vain after interest in the feeble
trash she was reading; now getting into the story for the last
half of a chapter, to find herself, when the scene changed at the
next, as far out and away and lost as ever; now dropping the book
on her knee, to sit musing--if, indeed, such poor mental vagaries
as hers can be called even musing!--ignorant what was the matter
with her, hardly knowing that anything was the matter, and yet
pining morally, spiritually, and psychically; now wondering when
Tom would be home; now trying to congratulate herself on his
being such a favorite, and thinking what an honor it was to a
poor country girl like her to be the wife of a man so much
courted by the best society--for she never doubted that the
people to whose houses Tom went desired his company from
admiration of his writings. She had not an idea that never a soul
of them or of their guests cared a straw about what he wrote--
except, indeed, here and there, a young lady in her first season,
who thought it a grand thing to know an author, as poor Letty
thought it a grand thing to be the wife of one. Hail to the
coming time when, those who write books outnumbering those who do
not, a man will be thought no more of because he can write than
because he can sit a horse or brew beer! In that happy time the
true writer will be neither an atom the more regarded nor
disregarded; he will only be less troubled with birthday books,
requests for autographs, and such-like irritating attentions.
From that time, also, it may be, the number of writers will begin
to diminish; for then, it is to be hoped, men will begin to see
that it is better to do the inferior thing well than the superior
thing after a middling fashion. The man who would not rather be a
good shoemaker than a middling author would be no honor to the
shoemakers, and can hardly be any to the authors. I have the
comfort that in this all authors will agree with me, for which of
us is now able to see himself _middling_? Honorable above
all honor that authorship can give is he who can.

It was through some of his old college friends that Tom had thus
easily stepped into the literary profession. They were young men
with money and friends to back them, who, having taken to
literature as soon as they chipped the university shell, were
already in the full swing of periodical production, when Tom, to
quote two rather contradictory utterances of his mother, ruined
his own prospects and made Letty's fortune by marrying her. I can
not say, however, that they had found him remunerative
employment. The best they had done for him was to bring him into
such a half sort of connection with a certain weekly paper that
now and then he got something printed in it, and now and then,
with the joke of acknowledging an obligation irremunerable, the
editor would hand him what he called an honorarium, but what in
reality was a five-pound note. When such an event occurred, Tom
would feel his bosom swell with the imagined dignity of
supporting a family by literary labor, and, forgetful of the
sparseness of his mother's doles, who delighted to make the young
couple feel the bitterness of dependence, would immediately, on
the strength of it, invite his friends to supper--not at the
lodging where Letty sat lonely, but at some tavern frequented by
people of the craft. It was at such times, and in the company of
men certainly not better than himself, that Tom's hopes were
brightest, and his confidence greatest: therefore such seasons
were those of his highest bliss. Especially, when his sensitive
but poor imagination was stimulated from the nerve-side of the
brain, was Tom in his glory; and it was not the "few glasses of
champagne," of which he talked so airily, that had all the honor
of crowning him king of fate and poet of the world. Long after
midnight, upon such and many other occasions, would he and his
companions sit laughing and jesting and drinking, some saying
witty things, and all of them foolish things and worse; inventing
stories apropos of the foibles of friends, and relating anecdotes
which grew more and more irreverent to God and women as the night
advanced, and the wine gained power, and the shame-faced angels
of their true selves, made in the image of God, withdrew into the
dark; until at last, between night and morning, Tom would reel
gracefully home, using all the power of his will--the best use to
which it ever was put--to subdue the drunkenness of which, even
in its embrace, he had the lingering honor to be ashamed, that he
might face his wife with the appearance of the gentleman he was
anxious she should continue to consider him.

It was an unhappy thing for Tom that his mother, having persuaded
her dying husband, "for Tom's sake," to leave the money in her
power, should not now have carried her tyranny further, and
refused him money altogether. He would then have been compelled
to work harder, and to use what he made in procuring the
necessaries of life. There might have been some hope for him
then. As it was, his profession was the mere grasping after the
honor of a workman without the doing of the work; while the
little he gained by it was, at the same time, more than enough to
foster the self-deception that he did something in the world.
With the money he gave her, which was never more than a part of
what his mother sent him, Letty had much ado to make both ends
meet; and, while he ran in debt to his tailor and bootmaker, she
never had anything new to wear. She did sometimes wish he would
take her out with him a little oftener of an evening; for
sometimes she felt so lonely as to be quite unable to amuse
herself: her resources were not many in her position, and fewer
still in herself; but she always reflected that he could not
afford it, and it was long ere she began to have any doubt or
uneasiness about him--long before she began even to imagine it
might be well if he spent his evenings with her, or, at least, in
other ways and other company than he did. When first such a
thought presented itself, she banished it as a disgrace to
herself and an insult to him. But it was no wonder if she found
marriage dull, poor child!--after such expectations, too, from
her Tom!

What a pity it seems to our purblind eyes that so many girls
should be married before they are women! The woman comes at
length, and finds she is forestalled--that the prostrate and
mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to
do the best with she can! But, thank God, in the faithfully
accepted and encountered responsibility, the woman must at length
become aware that she has under her feet an ascending stair by
which to climb to the woman of the divine ideal.

There was at present, however, nothing to be called thought in
the mind of Letty. She had even lost much of what faculty of
thinking had been developed in her by the care of Cousin Godfrey.
That had speedily followed the decay of the aspiration kindled in
her by Mary. Her whole life now--as much of it, that is, as was
awake--was Tom, and only Tom. Her whole day was but the
continuous and little varied hope of his presence. Most of the
time she had a book in her hands, but ever again book and hands
would sink into her lap, and she would sit staring before her at
nothing. She was not unhappy, she was only not happy. At first it
was a speechless delight to have as many novels as she pleased,
and she thought Tom the very prince of bounty in not merely
permitting her to read them, but bringing them to her, one after
the other, sometimes two at once, in spendthrift profusion. The
first thing that made her aware she was not quite happy was the
discovery that novels were losing their charm, that they were not
sufficient to make her day pass, that they were only dessert, and
she had no dinner. When it came to difficulty in going on with a
new one long enough to get interested in it, she sighed heavily,
and began to think that perhaps life was rather a dreary thing--
at least considerably diluted with the unsatisfactory. How many
of my readers feel the same! How few of them will recognize that
the state of things would indeed be desperate were it otherwise!
How many would go on and on being only butterflies, but for
life's dismay! And who would choose to be a butterfly, even if
life and summer and the flowers were to last for ever!

"I would," I fancy this and that reader saying.

"Then," I answer, "the only argument you are equal to, is the
fact that life nor summer nor the flowers do last for ever."

"I suppose I am made a butterfly," do you say? "seeing I prefer
to be one."

"Ah! do you say so, indeed? Then you begin to excuse yourself,
and what does that mean? It means that you are no butterfly, for
a butterfly--no, nor an angel in heaven--could never begin
excusing the law of its existence. Butterfly-brother, the hail
will be upon you."

I may not then pity Letty that she had to discover that novels
taken alone serve one much as sweetmeats _ad libitum_ do
children, nor that she had to prove that life has in it that
spiritual quinine, precious because bitter, whose part it is to
wake the higher hunger.

Tom talked of himself as on the staff of "The Firefly"--such was
the name of the newspaper whose editor sometimes paid him--a
weekly of great pretense, which took upon itself the mystery of
things, as if it were God's spy. It was popular in a way, chiefly
in fashionable circles. As regarded the opinions it promulgated,
I never heard one, who understood the particular question at any
time handled, say it was correct. Its writers were mostly young
men, and their passion was to say clever things. If a friend's
book came in their way, it was treated worse or better than that
of a stranger, but with impartial disregard for truth in either
case; yet many were the authors who would go up endless back
stairs to secure from that paper a flattering criticism, and then
be as proud of it as if it had been the genuine and unsought
utterance of a true man's conviction; and many were the men,
immeasurably the superiors of the reviewers, and in a general way
acquainted with their character, who would accept as conclusive
upon the merits of a book the opinions they gave, nor ever
question a mode of quotation by which a book was made to show
itself whatever the reviewer chose to call it. A scandalous rumor
of any kind, especially from the region styled "high life," often
false, and always incorrect, was the delight both of the paper
and of its readers; and the interest it thus awoke, united to the
fear it thus caused, was mainly what procured for such as were
known to be employed upon it the _entree_ of houses where,
if they had had a private existence only, their faces would never
have been seen. But, to do Tom justice, he wrote nothing of this
sort: he was neither ill-natured nor experienced enough for that
department; what he did write was clever, shallow sketches of
that same society into whose charmed precincts he was but so
lately a comer that much was to him interesting which had long
ceased to be observed by eyes turned horny with the glare of the
world's footlights; and, while these sketches pleased the young
people especially, even their jaded elders enjoyed the sparkling
reflex of what they called life, as seen by an outsider; for they
were thereby enabled to feel for a moment a slight interest in
themselves objectively, along with a galvanized sense of
existence as the producers of history. These sketches did more
for the paper than the editor was willing to know or acknowledge.

But "The Firefly" produced also a little art on its own account--
not always very original, but, at least, not a sucking of life
from the labor of others, as is most of that parasitic thing
miscalled criticism. In this branch Tom had a share, in the shape
of verse. A ready faculty was his, but one seldom roused by
immediate interest, and never by insight. It was not things
themselves, but the reflection of things in the art of others,
that moved him to produce. Coleridge, I think, says of Dryden,
that he took fire with the running of his own wheels: so did Tom;
but it was the running of the wheels of others that set his
wheels running. He was like some young preachers who spend a part
of the Saturday in reading this or that author, in order to
_get up_ the mental condition favorable to preaching on the
Sunday. He was really fond of poetry; delighted in the study of
its external elements for the sake of his craft; possessed not
only a good but cultivated ear for verse, which is a rare thing
out of the craft; had true pleasure in a fine phrase, in a strong
or brilliant word; last and chief, had a special faculty for
imitation; from which gifts, graces, and acquirements, it came,
that he could write almost in any style that moved him--so far,
at least, as to remind one who knew it, of that style; and that
every now and then appeared verses of his in "The Firefly."

As often as this took place, Letty was in the third heaven of
delight. For was not Tom's poetry unquestionably superior to
anything else the age could produce? was the poetry Cousin
Godfrey made her read once to be compared to Tom's? and was not
Tom her own husband? Happy woman she!

But, by the time at which my narrative has arrived, the first
mist of a coming fog had begun to gather faintly dim in her
heart. When Tom would come home happy, but talk perplexingly;
when he would drop asleep in the middle of a story she could make
nothing of; when he would burst out and go on laughing, and
refuse to explain the motive--how was she to avoid the conclusion
forced upon her, that he had taken too much strong drink? and,
when she noted that this condition reappeared at shorter and
shorter intervals, might she not well begin to be frightened, and
to feel, what she dared not allow, that she was being gradually
left alone--that Tom had struck into a diverging path, and they
were slowing parting miles from each other?




CHAPTER XXVIII.

MARY AKD LETTY.


When her landlady announced a visitor, Letty, not having yet one
friend in London, could not think who it should be. When Mary
entered, she sprang to her feet and stood staring: what with
being so much in the house, and seeing so few people, the poor
girl had, I think, grown a little stupid. But, when the fact of
Mary's presence cleared itself to her, she rushed forward with a
cry, fell into her arms, and burst out weeping. Mary held her
fast until she had a little come to herself, then, pushing her
gently away to the length of her arms, looked at her.

She was not a sight to make one happy. She was no longer the
plump, fresh girl that used to go singing about; nor was she
merely thin and pale, she looked unhealthy. Things could not be
going well with her. Had her dress been only disordered, that
might have been accidental, but it looked neglected--was not
merely dingy, but plainly shabby, and, to Mary's country eyes,
appeared on the wrong side of clean. Presently, as those eyes got
accustomed to the miserable light, they spied in the skirt of her
gown a perfunctory darn, revealing but too evidently that to
Letty there no longer seemed occasion for being particular. The
sadness of it all sunk to Mary's heart: Letty had not found
marriage a grand affair!

But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another
to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in
sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True,
her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself
as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the
advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of
sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay
patience, and strength, and hope, and faith, and joy. This last,
modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well
decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in
whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a
poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and
as Christians go in the present aeon of their history. Her whole
nature drew itself together, confronting the destroyer, whatever
he might be, in possession of Letty. How to help she could not
yet tell, but sympathy was already at its work.

"You are not looking your best, Letty," she said, clasping her
again in her arms.

With a little choking, Letty assured her she was quite well, only
rather overcome with the pleasure of seeing her so unexpectedly.

"How is Mr. Helmer?" asked Mary.

"Quite well--and very busy," answered Letty--a little hurriedly,
Mary thought. "--But," she added, in a tone of disappointment,
"you always used to call him Tom!"

"Oh!" answered Mary, with a smile, "one must be careful how one
takes liberties with married people. A certain mysterious change
seems to pass over some of them; they are not the same somehow,
and you have to make your acquaintance with them all over again
from the beginning."

"I shouldn't think such people's acquaintance worth making over
again," said Letty.

"How can you tell what it may be worth?" said Mary, "--they are
so different from what they were? Their friendship may now be one
that won't change so easily."

"Ah! don't be hard on me, Mary. I have never ceased to love you."

"I am _so_ glad!" answered Mary. "People don't generally
take much to me--at least, not to come _near_ me. But you
can _be_ friends without _having_ friends," she added,
with a sententiousness she had inherited.

"I don't quite understand you," said Letty, sadly; "but, then, I
never could quite, you know. Tom finds me very stupid."

These words strengthened Mary's suspicion, from the first a
probability, that all was not going well between the two; but she
shrunk from any approach to confidences with _one_ of a
married pair. To have such, she felt instinctively, would be a
breach of unity, except, indeed, that were already, and
irreparably, broken. To encourage in any married friend the
placing of a confidence that excludes the other, is to encourage
that friend's self-degradation. But neither was this a fault to
which Letty could have been tempted; she loved her Tom too much
for it: with all her feebleness, there was in Letty not a little
of childlike greatness, born of faith.

But, although Mary would make Letty tell nothing, she was not the
less anxious to discover, that she might, if possible, help. She
would observe: side-lights often reveal more than direct
illumination. It might be for Letty, and not for Mrs. Redmain,
she had been sent. He who made time in time would show.

"Are you going to be long in London, Mary?" asked Letty.

"Oh, a long time!" answered Mary, with a loving glance.

Letty's eyes fell, and she looked troubled.

"I am so sorry, Mary," she said, "that I can not ask you to come
here! We have only these two rooms, and--and--you see--Mrs.
Helmer is not very liberal to Tom, and--because they--don't get
on together very well--as I suppose everybody knows--Tom won't--
he won't consent to--to--"

"You little goose!" cried Mary; "you don't think I would come
down on you like a devouring dragon, without even letting you
know, and finding whether it would suit you!--I have got a
situation in London."

"A situation!" echoed Letty. "What can you mean, Mary? You
haven't left your own shop, and gone into somebody else's?"

"No, not exactly that," replied Mary, laughing; "but I have no
doubt most people would think that by far the more prudent thing
to have done."

"Then I don't," said Letty, with a little flash of her old
enthusiasm. "Whatever you do, Mary, I am sure will always be the
best."

"I am glad I have so much of your good opinion, Letty; but I am
not sure I shall have it still, when I have told you what I have
done. Indeed, I am not quite sure myself that I have done wisely;
but, if I have made a mistake, it is from having listened to love
more than to prudence."

"What!" cried Letty; "you're married, Mary?"

And here a strange thing, yet the commonest in the world,
appeared; had her own marriage proved to Letty the most blessed
of fates, she could not have shown more delight at the idea of
Mary's. I think men find women a little incomprehensible in this
matter of their friends' marriage: in their largerheartedness, I
presume, women are able to hope for their friends, even when they
have lost all hope for themselves.

"No," replied Mary, amused at having thus misled her. "It is
neither so bad nor so good as that. But I was far from
comfortable in the shop without my father, and kept thinking how
to find a life, more suitable for me. It was not plain to me that
my lot was cast there any longer, and one has no right to choose
difficulty; for, even if difficulty be the right thing for you,
the difficulty you choose can't be the right difficulty. Those
that are given to choosing, my father said, are given to
regretting. Then it happened that I fell in love--not with a
gentleman--don't look like that, Letty--but with a lady; and, as
the lady took a small fancy to me at the same time, and wanted to
have me about her, here I am."

"But, surely, that is not a situation fit for one like you,
Mary!" cried Letty, almost in consternation; for, notwithstanding
her opposition to her aunt's judgment in the individual case of
her friend, Letty's own judgments, where she had any, were mostly
of this world. "I suppose you are a kind of--of--companion to
your lady-friend?"

"Or a kind of lady's-maid, or a kind of dressmaker, or a kind of
humble friend--something like a dog, perhaps--only not to be
quite so much loved and petted; In truth, Letty, I do not know
what I am, or what I am going to be; but I shall find out before
long, and where's the use of knowing, any more than anything else
before it's wanted?"

"You take my breath away, Mary! The thing doesn't seem at all
like you! It's not consistent!--Mary Marston in a menial
position! I can't get a hold of it!"

"You remind me," said Mary, laughing, "of what my father said to
Mr. Turnbull once. They were nearer quarreling then than ever I
saw them. You remember my father's way, Letty--how he would say a
thing too quietly even to smile with it? I can't tell you what a
delight it is to me to talk to anybody that knew him!--Mr.
Turnbull imagined he did not know what he was about, for the
thoughts my father was thinking could not have lived a moment in
Mr. Turnbull. 'You see, John Turnbull,' my father said, 'no man
can look so inconsistent as one whose principles are not
understood; for hardly in anything will that man do as his friend
must have thought he would.'--I suppose you think, Letty," Mary
went on, with a merry air, "that, for the sake of consistency, I
should never do anything but sell behind a counter?"

"In that case," said Letty, "I ought to have married a milkman,
for a dairy is the only thing I understand. I can't help Tom ever
so little!--But I suppose it wouldn't be possible for two to
write poetry together, even if they were husband and wife, and
both of them clever!"

"Something like it has been tried, I believe," answered Mary,
"but not with much success. I suppose, when a man sets himself to
make anything, he must have it all his own way, or he can't do
it."

"I suppose that's it. I know Tom is very angry with the editor
when he wants to alter anything he has written. I'm sure Tom's
right, too. You can't think how much better Tom's way always is!-
-He makes that quite clear, even to poor, stupid me. But then,
you know, Tom's a genius; that's one thing there's _no_
doubt of!--But you haven't told me yet where you are."

"You remember Miss Mortimer, of Durnmelling?"

"Quite well, of course."

"She is Mrs. Redmain now: I am with her."

"You don't mean it! Why, Tom knows her very well! He has been
several times to parties at her house."

"And not you, too?" asked Mary.

"Oh, dear, no!" answered Letty, laughing, superior at Mary's
ignorance. "It's not the fashion in London, at least for
distinguished persons like my Tom, to take their wives to
parties."

"Are there no ladies at those parties, then?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Letty, smiling again at Mary's ignorance of
the world, "the grandest of ladies--duchesses and all. You don't
know what a favorite Tom is in the highest circles!"

Now Mary could believe almost anything bearing on Tom's being a
favorite, for she herself liked him a great deal more than she
approved of him; but she could not see the sense of his going to
parties without his wife, neither could she see that the
_height_ of the circle in which he was a favorite made any
difference. She had old-fashioned notions of a man and his wife
being one flesh, and felt a breach of the law where they were
separated, whatever the custom--reason there could be none. But
Letty seemed much too satisfied to give her any light on the
matter. Did it seem to her so natural that she could not
understand Mary's difficulty? She could not help suspecting,
however, that there might be something in this recurrence of a
separation absolute as death--for was it not a passing of one
into a region where the other could not follow?--to account for
the change in her.--The same moment, as if Letty divined what was
passing in Mary's thought, and were not altogether content with
the thing herself, but would gladly justify what she could not
explain, she added, in the tone of an unanswerable argument:

"Besides, Mary, how could I get a dress fit to wear at such
parties? You wouldn't have me go and look like a beggar! That
would be to disgrace Tom. Everybody in London judges everybody by
the clothes she wears. You should hear Tom's descriptions of the
ladies' dresses when he comes home!"

Mary was on the verge of crying out indignantly, "Then, if he
can't take you, why doesn't he stop at home with you?" but she
bethought herself in time to hold her peace. She settled it with
herself, however, that Tom must have less heart or yet more
muddled brains than she had thought.

"So, then," reverted Letty, as if willing to turn definitively
from the subject, "you are actually living with the beautiful
Mrs. Redmain! What a lucky girl you are! You will see no end of
grand people! You will see my Tom sometimes--when I can't!" she
added, with a sigh that went to Mary's heart.

"Poor thing!" she said to herself, "it isn't anything much out of
the way she wants--only a little more of a foolish husband's
company!"

It was no wonder that Tom found Letty dull, for he had just as
little of his own in him as she, and thought he had a great
store--which is what sends a man most swiftly along the road to
that final poverty in which even that which he has shall be taken
from him.

Mary did not stay so long with Letty as both would have liked,
for she did not yet know enough of Hesper's ways. When she got
home, she learned that she had a headache, and had not yet made
her appearance.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE EVENING STAR.


Notwithstanding her headache, however, Mrs. Redmain was going in
the evening to a small fancy-ball, meant for a sort of rehearsal
to a great one when the season should arrive. The part and
costume she had chosen were the suggestion of her own name: she
would represent the Evening Star, clothed in the early twilight;
and neither was she unfit for the part, nor was the dress she had
designed altogether unsuitable either to herself or to the part.
But she had sufficient confidence neither in herself nor her maid
to forestall a desire for Mary's opinion. After luncheon,
therefore, she sent for Miss Marston to her bedroom.

Mary found her half dressed, Folter in attendance, a great heap
of pink lying on the bed.

"Sit down, Mary," said Hesper, pointing to a chair; "I want your
advice. But I must first explain. Where I am going this evening,
nobody is to be herself except me. I am not to be Mrs. Redmain,
though, but Hesper. You know what Hesper means?"

Mary said she knew, and waited--a little anxious; for sideways in
her eyes glowed the pink of the chosen Hesperian clouds, and, if
she should not like it, what could be done at that late hour.

"There is my dress," continued the Evening Star, with a glance of
her eyes, for Folter was busied with her hair; "I want to know
your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed
to say, "Have not _I_ spoken?" but what it really did mean,
how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to
understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is
far the more perplexing of the two.

"I should like to see it on first," said Mary: she was in doubt
whether the color--bright, to suggest the brightest of sunset-
clouds--would suit Hesper's complexion. Then, again, she had
always associated the name _Hesper_ with a later, a solemnly
lovely period of twilight, having little in common with the color
so voluminous in the background.

Hesper had a good deal of appreciative faculty, and knew
therefore when she liked and when she did not like a thing; but
she had very little originative faculty--so little that, when
anything was wrong, she could do next to nothing to set it right.
There was small originality in taking a suggestion for her part
from her name, and less in the idea, following by concatenation,
of adopting for her costume sunset colors upon a flimsy material,
which might more than hint at clouds. She had herself, with the
assistance of Sepia and Folter, made choice of the particular
pink; but, although it continued altogether delightful in the
eyes of her maid, it had, upon nearer and pro-longed
acquaintance, become doubtful in hers; and she now waited, with
no little anxiety, the judgment of Mary, who sat silently
thinking.

"Have you nothing to say?" she asked, at length, impatiently.

"Please, ma'am," replied Mary, "I must think, if I am to be of
any use. I am doing my best, but you must let me be quiet."

Half annoyed, half pleased, Hesper was silent, and Mary went on
thinking. All was still, save for the slight noises Folter made,
as, like a machine, she went on heartlessly brushing her
mistress's hair, which kept emitting little crackles, as of
dissatisfaction with her handling. Mary would now take a good
gaze at the lovely creature, now abstract herself from the
visible, and try to call up the vision of her as the real Hesper,
not a Hesper dressed up--a process which had in it hope for the
lady, but not much for the dress upon the bed. At last Folter had
done her part.

"I suppose you _must_ see it on!" said Hesper, and she rose
up.

Folter jerked herself to the bed, took the dress, arranged it on
her arms, got up on a chair, dropped it over her mistress's head,
got down, and, having pulled it this way and that for a while,
fastened it here, undone it there, and fastened it again, several
times, exclaimed, in a tone whose confidence was meant to
forestall the critical impertinence she dreaded:

"There, ma'am! If you don't look the loveliest woman in the room,
I shall never trust my eyes again."

Mary held her peace, for the commonplace style of the dress but
added to her dissatisfaction with the color. It was all puffed
and bubbled and blown about, here and there and everywhere, so
that the form of the woman was lost in the frolic shapelessness
of the cloud. The whole, if whole it could be called, was a
miserable attempt at combining fancy and fashion, and, in result,
an ugly nothing.

"I see you don't like it!" said Hesper, with a mingling of
displeasure and dismay. "I wish you had come a few days sooner!
It is much too late to do anything now. I might just as well have
gone without showing it to you!--Here, Folter!"

With a look almost of disgust, she began to pull off the dress,
in which, a few hours later, she would yet make the attempt to
enchant an assembly.

"O ma'am!" cried Mary, "I wish you had told me yesterday. There
would have been time then.--And I don't know," she added, seeing
disgust change to mortification on Hesper's countenance, "but
something might be done yet."

"Oh, indeed!" dropped from Folter's lips with an indescribable
expression.

"What can be done?" said Hesper, angrily. "There can be no time
for anything."

"If only we had the stuff!" said Mary. "That shade doesn't suit
your complexion. It ought to be much, much darker--in fact, a
different color altogether."

Folter was furious, but restrained herself sufficiently to
preserve some calmness of tone, although her face turned almost
blue with the effort, as she said:

"Miss Marston is not long from the country, ma'am, and don't know
what's suitable to a London drawing-room."

Her mistress was too dejected to snub her impertinence.

"What color were you thinking of, Miss Marston?" Hesper asked,
with a stiffness that would have been more in place had Mary
volunteered the opinion she had been asked to give. She was out
of temper with Mary from feeling certain she was right, and
believing there was no remedy.

"I could not describe it," answered Mary. "And, indeed, the color
I have in my mind may not be to be had. I have seen it somewhere,
but, whether in a stuff or only in nature, I can not at this
moment be certain."

"Where's the good of talking like that--excuse me, ma'am--it's
more than I can bear--when the ball comes off in a few hours?"
cried Folter, ending with eyes of murder on Mary.

"If you would allow me, ma'am," said Mary, "I should like much to
try whether I could not find something that would suit you and
your idea too. However well you might look in that, you would owe
it no thanks. The worst is, I know nothing of the London shops."

"I should think not!" remarked Folter, with emphasis.

"I would send you in the brougham, if I thought it was of any
use," said Hesper. "Folter could take you to the proper places."

"Folter would be of no use to me," said Mary. "If your coachman
knows the best shops, that will be enough."

"But there's no time to make up anything," objected Hesper,
despondingly, not the less with a glimmer of hope in her heart.

"Not like that," answered Mary; "but there is much there as
unnecessary as it is ugly. If Folter is good at her needle--"

"I won't take up a single stitch. It would be mere waste of
labor," cried Folter.

"Then, please, ma'am," said Mary, "let Folter have that dress
ready, and, if I don't succeed, you have something to wear."

"I hate it. I won't go if you don't find me another."

"Some people may like it, though I don't," said Mary.

"Not a doubt of that!" said Folter.

"Ring the bell," said her mistress.

The woman obeyed, and the moment afterward repented she had not
given warning on the spot, instead. The brougham was ordered
immediately, and in a few minutes Mary was standing at a counter
in a large shop, looking at various stuffs, of which the young
man waiting on her soon perceived she knew the qualities and
capabilities better than he.

She had set her heart on carrying out Hesper's idea, but in
better fashion; and after great pains taken, and no little
trouble given, left the shop well satisfied with her success. And
now for the greater difficulty!

She drove straight to Letty's lodging, and, there dismissing the
brougham, presented herself, with a great parcel in her arms, for
the second time that day, at the door of her room, as unexpected
as the first, and even more to the joy of her solitary friend.

She knew that Letty was good at her needle. And Letty was,
indeed, even now, by fits, fond of using it; and on several
occasions, when her supply of novels had for a day run short, had
asked a dressmaker who lived above to let her help her for an
hour or two: before Mary had finished her story, she was untying
the parcel, and preparing to receive her instructions. Nor had
they been at work many minutes, when Letty bethought her of
calling in the help of the said dressmaker; so that presently
there were three of them busy as bees--one with genius, one with
experience, and all with facility. The notions of the first were
quickly taken up by the other two, and, the design of the dress
being simplicity itself, Mary got all done she wanted in shorter
time than she had thought possible. The landlady sent for a cab,
and Mary was home with the improbability in more than time for
Mrs. Redmain's toilet. It was with some triumph, tempered with
some trepidation, that she carried it to her room.

There Folter was in the act of persuading her mistress of the
necessity of beginning to dress: Miss Marston, she said, knew
nothing of what she had undertaken; and, even if she arrived in
time, it would be with something too ridiculous for any lady to
appear in--when Mary entered, and was received with a cry of
delight from Hesper; in proportion to whose increasing disgust
for the pink robe, was her pleasure when she caught sight of
Mary's colors, as she undid the parcel: when she lifted the dress
on her arm for a first effect, she was enraptured with it--aerial
in texture, of the hue of a smoky rose, deep, and cloudy with
overlying folds, yet diaphanous, a darkness dilute with red.

Silent as a torture-maiden, and as grim, Folter approached to try
the filmy thing, scornfully confident that the first sight of it
on would prove it unwearable. But Mary judged her scarcely in a
mood to be trusted with anything so ethereal; and begged
therefore that, as the dress had, of necessity, been in many
places little more than run together, and she knew its weak
points, she might, for that evening, be allowed the privilege of
dressing Mrs. Redmain. Hesper gladly consented; Folter left the
room; Mary, now at her ease, took her place; and presently, more
to Hesper's pleasure than Mary's surprise, for she had made and
fixed in her mind the results of minute observation before she
went, it was found that the dress fitted quite sufficiently well,
and, having confined it round the waist with a cincture of thin
pale gold, she advanced to her chief anxiety--the head-dress.

For this she had chosen such a doubtful green as the sky appears
through yellowish smoke--a sad, lovely color--the fair past
clouded with the present--youth not forgotten, but filmed with
age. They were all colors of the evening, as it strives to keep
its hold of the heavens, with the night pressing upon it from
behind. In front, above the lunar forehead, among the coronal
masses, darkly fair, she fixed a diamond star, and over it wound
the smoky green like a turbaned vapor, wind-ruffled, through
which the diamonds gleamed faintly by fits. Not once would she,
while at her work, allow Hesper to look, and the self-willed lady
had been submissive in her hands as a child of the chosen; but
the moment she had succeeded--for her expectations were more than
realized--she led her to the cheval-glass. Hesper gazed for an
instant, then, turning, threw her arms about Mary, and kissed
her.

"I don't believe you're a human creature at all!" she cried. "You
are a fairy godmother, come to look after your poor Cinderella,
the sport of stupid lady's-maids and dressmakers!"

The door opened, and Folter entered.

"If you please, ma'am, I wish to leave this day month," she said,
quietly.

"Then," answered her mistress, with equal calmness, "oblige me by
going at once to Mrs. Perkin, and telling her that I desire her
to pay you a month's wages, and let you leave the house to-morrow
morning.--You won't mind helping me to dress till I get another
maid--will you, Mary?" she added; and Folter left the room,
chagrined at her inability to cause annoyance.

"I do not see why you should have another maid so long as I am
with you, ma'am," said Mary. "It should not need many days'
apprenticeship to make one woman able to dress another."

"Not when she is like you, Mary," said Hesper. "It is well the
wretch has done my hair for to-night, though! That will be the
main difficulty."

"It will not be a great one," said Mary, "if you will allow me to
undo it when you come home."

"I begin almost to believe in a special providence," said Hesper.
"What a blessed thing for me that you came to drive away that
woman! She has been getting worse and worse."

"If I have driven her away," answered Mary, "I am bound to supply
her place."

As they talked, she was giving her final touches of arrangement
to the head-dress--with which she found it least easy to satisfy
herself. It swept round from behind in a misty cloak, the two
colors mingling with and gently obscuring each other; while,
between them, the palest memory of light, in the golden cincture,
helped to bring out the somber richness, the delicate darkness of
the whole.

Searching now again Hesper's jewel-case, Mary found a fine
bracelet of the true, the Oriental topaz, the old chrysolite--of
that clear yellow of the sunset-sky that looks like the 'scaped
spirit of miser-smothered gold: this she clasped upon one arm;
and when she had fastened a pair of some ancient Mortimer's
garnet buckles in her shoes, which she had insisted should be
black, and taken off all the rings that Hesper had just put on,
except a certain glorious sapphire, she led her again to the
mirror; and, if there Hesper was far more pleased with herself
than was reasonable or lovely, my reader needs not therefore fear
a sermon from the text, "Beauty is only skin-deep," for that text
is out of the devil's Bible. No Baal or Astarte is the maker of
beauty, but the same who made the seven stars and Orion, and His
works are past finding out. If only the woman herself and her
worshipers knew how deep it is! But the woman's share in her own
beauty may be infinitely less than skin-deep; and there is but
one greater fool than the man who worships that beauty--the woman
who prides herself upon it, as if she were the fashioner and not
the thing fashioned.

But poor Hesper had much excuse, though no justification. She had
had many of the disadvantages and scarce one of the benefits of
poverty. She had heard constantly from childhood the most worldly
and greedy talk, the commonest expression of abject dependence on
the favors of Mammon, and thus had from the first been in
preparation for _marrying money_. She had been taught no
other way of doing her part to procure the things of which the
Father knows we have need. She had never earned a dinner; had
never done or thought of doing a day's work--of offering the
world anything for the sake of which the world might offer her a
shilling to do it again; she had never dreamed of being of any
use, even to herself; she had learned to long for money, but had
never been hungry, never been cold: she had sometimes felt
shabby. Out of it all she had brought but the knowledge that this
matter of beauty, with which, by some blessed chance, she was
endowed, was worth much precious money in the world's market--
worth all the dresses she could ever desire, worth jewels and
horses and servants, adoration and adulation--everything, in
fact, the world calls fine, and the devil offers to those who,
unscared by his inherent ugliness, will fall down and worship
him.




CHAPTER XXX.

A SCOLDING.


The Evening Star found herself a success--that is, much followed
by the men and much complimented by the women. Her triumph,
however, did not culminate until the next appearance of "The
Firefly," containing a song "To the Evening Star," which
_everybody_ knew to stand for Mrs. Redmain. The chaos of the
uninitiated, indeed, exoteric and despicable, remained in
ignorance, nor dreamed that the verses meant anybody of note; to
them they seemed but the calf-sigh of some young writer so deep
in his first devotion that he jumbled up his lady-love, Hesper,
and Aphrodite, in the same poetic bundle--of which he left the
string-ends hanging a little loose, while, upon the whole, it
remained a not altogether unsightly bit of prentice-work. Tom had
not been at the party, but had gathered fire enough from what he
heard of Hesper's appearance there to write the verses. Here they
are, as nearly as I can recall them. They are in themselves not
worth writing out for the printers, but, in their surroundings,
they serve to show Tom, and are the last with which I shall
trouble the readers of this narrative.

"TO THE EVENING STAR.

  "From the buried sunlight springing,
    Through flame-darkened, rosy loud,
  Native sea-hues with thee bringing,
    In the sky thou reignest proud!

  "Who is like thee, lordly lady,
    Star-choragus of the night!
  Color worships, fainting fady,
    Night grows darker with delight!

  "Dusky-radiant, far, and somber,
    In the coolness of thy state,
  From my eyelids chasing slumber,
    Thou dost smile upon my fate;

  "Calmly shinest; not a whisper
    Of my songs can reach thine ear;
  What is it to thee, O Hesper,
    That a heart should long or fear?"

Tom did not care to show Letty this poem--not that there was
anything more in his mind than an artistic admiration of Hesper,
and a desire to make himself agreeable in her eyes; but, when
Letty, having read it, betrayed no shadow of annoyance with its
folly, he was a little relieved. The fact was, the simple
creature took it as a pardon to herself.

"I am glad you have forgiven me, Tom," she said.

"What do you mean?" asked Tom.

"For working for Mrs. Redmain with _your_ hands," she said,
and, breaking into a little laugh, caught his cheeks between
those same hands, and reaching up gave him a kiss that made him
ashamed of himself--a little, that is, and for the moment, that
is: Tom was used to being this or that a little for the moment.

For this same dress, which Tom had thus glorified in song, had
been the cause of bitter tears to Letty. He came home _too
late_ the day of Mary's visit, but the next morning she told
him all about both the first and the second surprise she had had
--not, however, with much success in interesting the lordly youth.

"And then," she went on, "what do you think we were doing all the
afternoon, Tom?"

"How should I know?" said Tom, indifferently.

"We were working hard at a dress--a dress for a fancy-ball!"

"A fancy-ball, Letty? What do you mean? You going to a fancy-
ball!"

"Me!" cried Letty, with merry laugh; "no, not quite me. Who do
you think it was for?"

"How should I know?" said Tom again, but not quite so
indifferently; he was prepared to be annoyed.

"For Mrs. Redmain!" said Letty, triumphantly, clapping her hands
with delight at what she thought the fun of the thing, for was
not Mrs. Redmain Tom's friend?--then stooping a little--it was an
unconscious, pretty trick she had--and holding them out, palm
pressed to palm, with the fingers toward his face.

"Letty," said Tom, frowning--and the frown deepened and deepened;
for had he not from the first, if in nothing else, taken trouble
to instruct her in what became the wife of Thomas Helmer, Esq.?--
"Letty, this won't do!"

Letty was frightened, but tried to think he was only pretending
to be displeased.

"Ah! don't frighten me, Tom," she said, with her merry hands now
changed to pleading ones, though their position and attitude
remained the same.

But he caught them by the wrists in both of his, and held them
tight.

"Letty," he said once more, and with increased severity, "this
won't do. I tell you, it won't do."

"What won't do, Tom?" she returned, growing white. "There's no
harm done."

"Yes, there is," said Tom, with solemnity; "there _is_ harm
done, when _my_ wife goes and does like that. What would
people say of _me,_ if they were to come to know--God forbid
they should!--that your husband was talking all the evening to
ladies at whose dresses his wife had been working all the
afternoon!--You don't know what you are doing, Letty. What do you
suppose the ladies would think if they were to hear of it?"

Poor, foolish Tom, ignorant in his folly, did not know how little
those grand ladies would have cared if his wife had been a char-
woman: the eyes of such are not discerning of fine social
distinctions in women who are not of their set, neither are the
family relations of the bohemians they invite of the smallest
consequence to them.

"But, Tom," pleaded his wife, "such a grand lady as that! one you
go and read your poetry to! What harm can there be in your poor
little wife helping to make a dress for a lady like that?"

"I tell you, Letty, I don't choose _my_ wife to do such a
thing for the greatest lady in the land! Good Heavens! if it
_were_ to come to the ears of the staff! It would be the
ruin of me! I should never hold up my head again!"

By this time Letty's head was hanging low, like a flower half
broken from its stem, and two big tears were slowly rolling down
her cheeks. But there was a gleam of satisfaction in her heart
notwithstanding. Tom thought so much of his little wife that he
would not have her work for the greatest lady in the land! She
did not see that it was not pride in her, but pride in himself,
that made him indignant at the idea. It was not "my _wife,"_
but "_my_ wife" with Tom. She looked again up timidly in his
face, and said, her voice trembling, and her cheeks wet, for she
could not wipe away the tears, because Tom still held her hands
as one might those of a naughty child:

"But, Tom! I don't exactly see how you can make so much of it,
when you don't think me--when you know I am not fit to go among
such people."

To this Tom had no reply at hand: he was not yet far enough down
the devil's turnpike to be able to tell his wife that he had
spoken the truth--that he did not think her fit for such company;
that he would be ashamed of her in it; that she had no style;
that, instead of carrying herself as if she knew herself
somebody--as good as anybody there, indeed, being the wife of Tom
Helmer--she had the meek look of one who knew herself nobody, and
did not know her husband to be anybody. He did not think how
little he had done to give the unassuming creature that quiet
confidence which a woman ought to gather from the assurance of
her husband's satisfaction in her, and the consciousness of
being, in dress and everything else, pleasing in his eyes,
therefore of occupying the only place in the world she desires to
have. But he did think that Letty's next question might naturally
be, "Why do you not take me with you?" No doubt he could have
answered, no one had ever asked her; but then she might rejoin,
had he ever put it in any one's way to ask her? It might even
occur to her to in-quire whether he had told Mrs. Redmain that he
had a wife! and he had heart enough left to imagine it might
mortally hurt her to find he lived a life so utterly apart from
hers--that she had so little of the relations though all the
rights of wifehood. It was no wonder, therefore, if he was more
than willing to change the subject. He let the poor, imprisoned
hands drop so abruptly that, in their abandonment, they fell
straight from her shoulders to her sides.

"Well, well, child!" he said; "put on your bonnet, and we shall
be in time for the first piece at the Lyceum."

Letty flew, and was ready in five minutes. She could dress the
more quickly that she was delayed by little doubt as to what she
had better wear: she had scarcely a choice. Tom, looking after
his own comforts, left her to look after her necessities; and
she, having a conscience, and not much spirit, went even shabbier
than she yet needed.




CHAPTER XXXI.

SEPIA.


As naturally as if she had been born to that very duty and no
other, Mary slid into the office of lady's-maid to Mrs. Redmain,
feeling in it, although for reasons very different, no more
degradation than her mistress saw in it. If Hesper was
occasionally a little rude to her, Mary was not one to _accept_
a rudeness--that is, to wrap it up in resentment, and put it
away safe in the pocket of memory. She could not help
feeling things of the kind--sometimes with indignation and anger;
but she made haste to send them from her, and shut the doors
against them. She knew herself a far more blessed creature than
Hesper, and felt the obligation, from the Master himself, of so
enduring as to keep every channel of service open between Hesper
and her. To Hesper, the change from the vulgar service of Folter
to the ministration of Mary was like passing from a shallow
purgatory to a gentle paradise. Mary's service was full of live
and near presence, as that of dew or summer wind; Folter handled
her as if she were dressing a doll, Mary as if she were dressing
a baby; her hands were deft as an angel's, her feet as noiseless
as swift. And to have Mary near was not only to have a
ministering spirit at hand, but to have a good atmosphere all
around--an air, a heaven, out of which good things must momently
come. Few could be closely associated with her and not become
aware at least of the capacity of being better, if not of the
desire to be better.

In the matter of immediate result, it was a transition from
decoration to dress. If in any sense Hesper was well dressed
before, she was in every sense well dressed now--dressed so, that
is, as to reveal the nature, the analogies, and the associations
of her beauty: no manner of dressing can make a woman look more
beautiful than she is, though many a mode may make her look less
so.

There was one in the house, however, who was not pleased at the
change from Folter to Mary: Sepia found herself in consequence
less necessary to Hesper. Hitherto Hesper had never been
satisfied without Sepia's opinion and final approval in that
weightiest of affairs, the matter of dress; but she found in Mary
such a faculty as rendered appeal to Sepia unnecessary; for she
not only satisfied her idea of herself, and how she would choose
to look, but showed her taste as much surer than Sepia's as
Sepia's was readier than Hesper's own. Sepia was equal to the
dressing of herself--she never blundered there; but there was
little dependence to be placed upon her in dressing another. She
cared for herself, not for another; and to dress another, love is
needful--love, the only true artist--love, the only opener of
eyes. She cared nothing to minister to the comfort or
beautification of her cousin, and her displeasure did not arise
from the jealousy that is born of affection. So far as Hesper's
self was concerned, Sepia did not care a straw whether she was
well or ill dressed; but, if the link between them of dress was
severed, what other so strong would be left? And to find herself
in any way a less object in Hesper's eyes, would be to find
herself on the inclined plane of loss, and probable ruin.

Another, though a smaller, point was, that hitherto she had
generally been able so to dress Hesper as to make of her more or
less a foil to herself. My reader may remember that there was
between Hesper and Sepia, if not a resemblance, yet a relation of
appearance, like, vaguely, that between the twilight and the
night; seen in certain positions and circumstances, the one would
recall the other; and it was therefore a matter of no small
consequence to Sepia that the relation of her dress to Hesper's
should be such as to give herself any advantage to be derived in
it from the relation of their looks. This was far more difficult,
of course, when she had no longer a voice in the matter of
Hesper's dress, and when the loving skill of the new maid
presented her rival to her individual best. Mary would have been
glad to help her as well, but Sepia drew back as from a hostile
nature, and they made no approximation. This was more loss to
Sepia than she knew, for Mary would have assisted her in doing
the best when she had no money, a condition which often made it
the more trying that she had now so little influence over her
cousin's adornment. To dress was a far more difficult, though not
more important, affair with Sepia than with Hesper, for she had
nothing of her own, and from, her cousin no fixed allowance. Any
arrangement of the kind had been impossible at Durnmelling, where
there was no money; and here, where it would have been easy
enough, she judged it better to give no hint in its direction,
although plainly it had never suggested itself to Hesper. There
was nothing of the money-mean in her, any more than in her
husband. They were of course, as became people of fashion,
regular and unwearied attendants of the church of Mammon,
ordering all their judgments and ways in accordance with the
precepts there delivered; but they were none of Mammon's priests
or pew-openers, money-grubs, or accumulators. They gave liberally
where they gave, and scraped no inferior to spend either on
themselves or their charities. They had plenty, it is true; but
so have many who withhold more than is meet, and take the ewe-
lamb to add to their flock. For one thing, they had no time for
that sort of wickedness, and took no interest in it. So Hesper,
although it had not come into her mind to give her the ease of a
stated allowance, behaved generously to Sepia--when she thought
of it; but she did not love her enough to be love-watchful, and
seldom thought how her money must be going, or questioned whether
she might not at the moment be in want of more. There are many
who will give freely, who do not care to understand need and
anticipate want. Hence at times Sepia's purse would be long empty
before the giving-thought would wake in the mind of Hesper. When
it woke, it was gracious and free.


Had Sepia ventured to run up bills with the tradespeople, Hesper
would have taken it as a thing of course, and settled them with
her own. But Sepia had a certain politic pride in spending only
what was given her; also she saw or thought she saw serious
reason for avoiding all appearances of taking liberties; from the
first of Mr. Redmain's visits to Durnmelling, she had been aware,
with an instinct keen in respect of its objects, though blind as
to its own nature, that he did not like her, and soon satisfied
herself that any overt attempt to please him would but ripen his
dislike to repugnance; and her dread was that he might make it a
condition with Mr. Mortimer that Hesper's intimacy with her
should cease; whereas, if once they were married, the husband's
disfavor would, she believed, only strengthen the wife's
predilection. Having so far gained her end, it remained, however,
almost as desirable as before that she should do nothing to fix
or increase his dislike--nay, that, if within the possible, she
should become pleasing to him. Did not even hate turn sometimes
to its mighty opposite? But she understood so little of the man
with whom she had to deal that her calculations were ill-founded.

She was right in believing that Mr. Redmain disliked her, but she
was wrong in imagining that he had therefore any objection to her
being for the present in the house. He certainly did not relish
the idea of her continuing to be his wife's inseparable
companion, but there would be time enough to get rid of her after
he had found her out. For she had not long been one of his
_family,_ before he knew, with insight unerring, that she
had to be found out, and was therefore an interesting subject for
the exercise of his faculty of moral analysis. He was certain her
history was composed mainly of secrets. As yet, however, he had
discovered nothing.

I must just remind my reader of the intellectual passion I have
already mentioned as characterizing Mr. Redmain's mental
constitution. His faults and vices were by no means peculiar; but
the bent to which I refer, certainly no virtue, and springing
originally from predominant evil, was in no small degree
peculiar, especially in the degree to which, derived as it was
from his father, he had in his own being developed it. Most men,
he judged with himself, were such fools as well as rogues, that
there was not the least occasion to ask what they were after:
they did but turn themselves inside out before you! But, on the
other hand, there were not a few who took pains, more or less
successful, to conceal their game of life; and such it was the
delight of his being to lay bare to his own eyes-not to those of
other people; that, he said, would be to spoil his game! Men were
his library, he said-his history, his novels, his sermons, his
philosophy, his poetry, his whole literature--and he did not like
to have his books thumbed by other people. Human nature, in its
countless aspects, was all about him, he said, every mask crying
to him to take it off. Unhappily, it was but the morbid anatomy
of human nature he cared to study. For all his abuse of it, he
did not yet recognize it as morbid, but took it as normal, and
the best to be had. No doubt, he therein judged and condemned
himself, but that he never thought of--nor, perceived, would it
have been a point of any consequence to him.

From the first, he saw through Mr. Mortimer, and all belonging to
him, except Miss Yolland: she soon began to puzzle--and, so far,
to please him, though, as I have said, he did not like her. Had
he been a younger man, she would have captivated him; as it was,
she would have repelled him entirely, but that she offered him a
good subject. He said to himself that she was a bad lot, but what
sort of a bad lot was not so clear as to make her devoid of
interest to him; he must discover how she played her life-game;
she had a history, and he would fain know it. As I have said,
however, so far it had come to nothing, for, upon the surface,
Sepia showed herself merely like any other worldly girl who knows
"on which side her bread is buttered."

The moment he had found, or believed he had found, what there was
to know about her, he was sure to hate her heartily. For some
time after his marriage, he appeared at his wife's parties
oftener than he otherwise would have done, just for the sake of
having an eye upon Sepia; but had seen nothing, nor the shadow of
anything--until one night, by the merest chance, happening to
enter his wife's drawing-room, he caught a peculiar glance
between Sepia and a young man--not very young--who had just
entered, and whom he had not seen before.

To not a few it seemed strange that, with her unquestioned powers
of fascination, she had not yet married; but London is not the
only place in which poverty is as repellent as beauty is
attractive. At the same time it must be confessed there was
something about her which made not a few men shy of her. Some
found that, if her eyes drew them within a certain distance,
there they began to repel them, they could not tell why. Others
felt strangely uncomfortable in her presence from the first. Not
only much that a person has done, but much of what a person is
capable of, is, I suspect, written on the bodily presence; and,
although no human eye is capable of reading more than here and
there a scattered hint of the twilight of history, which is the
aurora of prophecy, the soul may yet shudder with an instinctive
foreboding it can not explain, and feel the presence, without
recognizing the nature, of the hostile.

Sepia's eyes were her great power. She knew the laws of mortar-
practice in that kind as well as any officer of engineers those
of projectiles. There was something about her engines which it
were vain to attempt to describe. Their lightest glance was a
thing not to be trifled with, and their gaze a thing hardly to be
withstood. Sustained and without hurt defied, it could hardly be
by man of woman born. They were large, but no fool would be taken
with mere size. They were as dark as ever eyes of woman, but our
older poets delighted in eyes as gray as glass: certainly not in
their darkness lay their peculiar witchery. They were grandly
proportioned, neither almond-shaped nor round, neither prominent
nor deep-set; but even shape by itself is not much. If I go on to
say they were luminous, plainly there the danger begins. Sepia's
eyes, I confess, were not lords of the deepest light--for she was
not true; but neither was theirs a surface light, generated of
merely physical causes: through them, concentrating her will upon
their utterance, she could establish a psychical contact with
_almost_ any man she chose. Their power was an evil, selfish
shadow of original, universal love. By them she could produce at
once, in the man on whom she turned their play, a sense as it
were of some primordial, fatal affinity between her and him--of
an aboriginal understanding, the rare possession of but a few of
the pairs made male and female. Into those eyes she would call up
her soul, and there make it sit, flashing light, in gleams and
sparkles, shoots and coruscations--not from great, black pupils
alone--to whose size there were who said the suicidal belladonna
lent its aid--but from great, dark irids as well--nay, from
eyeballs, eyelashes, and eyelids, as from spiritual catapult or
culverin, would she dart the lightnings of her present soul,
invading with influence as irresistible as subtile the soul of
the man she chose to assail, who, thenceforward, for a season, if
he were such as she took him for, scarce had choice but be her
slave. She seldom exerted their full force, however, without some
further motive than mere desire to captivate. There are women who
fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all; but Sepia
did not so waste herself: her quarry must be worth her hunt: she
must either love him or need him. _Love!_ did I say? Alas! if
ever holy word was put to unholy use, _love_ is that word!
When Diana goes to hell, her name changes to Hecate, but love
among the devils is called love still!

In more than one other country, whatever might be the cause,
Sepia had found _the men_ less shy of her than here; and she
had almost begun to think her style was not generally pleasing to
English eyes. Whether this had anything to do with the fact that
now in London she began to amuse herself with Tom Helmer, I can
not say with certainty; but almost if not quite the first time
they met, that morning, namely, when first he called, and they
sat in the bay-window of the drawing-room in Glammis Square, she
brought her eyes to play upon him; and, although he addressed
"The Firefly" poem to Hesper in the hope of pleasing her, it was
for the sake of Sepia chiefly that he desired the door of her
house to be an open one to him. Whether at that time she knew he
was a married man, it is hardly necessary to inquire, seeing it
would have made no difference whatever to one like her, whose
design was only to amuse herself with the youth, and possibly to
make of him a screen. She went so far, however, as to allow him,
when there was opportunity, to draw her into quiet corners, and
even to linger when the other guests were gone, and he had had
his full share of champagne. Once, indeed, they remained together
so long in the little conservatory, lighted only by an alabaster
lamp, pale as the moon in the dawning, that she had to unbolt the
door to let him out. This did not take place without coming to
the knowledge of both Mr. and Mrs. Redmain; but the former was
only afraid there was nothing in it, and was far from any wish to
control her; and Sepia herself was the in-formant of the latter.
To her she would make game of her foolish admirer, telling how,
on this and that occasion, it was all she could do to get rid of
him.




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.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

A STRAY SOUND.


Mary went to see Letty as often as she could, and that was not
seldom; but she had scarcely a chance of seeing Tom; either he
was not up, or had gone--to the office, Letty supposed: she had
no more idea of where the office was, or of the other localities
haunted by Tom, than he himself had of what spirit he was of.

One day, when Mary could not help remarking upon her pale, weary
looks, Letty burst into tears, and confided to her a secret of
which she was not the less proud that it caused her anxiety and
fear. As soon as she began to talk about it, the joy of its hope
began to predominate, and before Mary left her she might have
seemed to a stranger the most blessed little creature in the
world. The greatness of her delight made Mary sad for her. To any
thoughtful heart it must be sad to think what a little time the
joy of so many mothers lasts--not because their babies die, but
because they live; but Mary's mournfulness was caused by the fear
that the splendid dawn of mother-hope would soon be swallowed in
dismal clouds of father-fault. For mothers and for wives there is
no redemption, no unchaining of love, save by the coming of the
kingdom--_in themselves_. Oh! why do not mothers, sore-
hearted mothers at least, if none else on the face of the earth,
rush to the feet of the Son of Mary?

Yet every birth is but another link in the golden chain by which
the world shall be lifted to the feet of God. It is only by the
birth of new children, ever fresh material for the creative
Spirit of the Son of Man to work upon, that the world can finally
be redeemed. Letty had no _ideas_ about children, only the
usual instincts of appropriation and indulgence; Mary had a few,
for she recalled with delight some of her father's ways with
herself. Him she knew as, next to God, the source of her life, so
well had he fulfilled that first duty of all parents--the
transmission of life. About such things she tried to talk to
Letty, but soon perceived that not a particle of her thought
found its way into Letty's mind: she cared nothing for any duty
concerned--only for the joy of being a mother.

She grew paler yet and thinner; dark hollows came about her eyes;
she was parting with life to give it to her child; she lost the
girlish gayety Tom used to admire, and the something more lovely
that was taking its place he was not capable of seeing. He gave
her less and less of his company. His countenance did not shine
on her; in her heart she grew aware that she feared him, and,
ever as she shrunk, he withdrew. Had it not now been for Mary,
she would likely have died. She did all for her that friend
could. As often as she seemed able, she would take her for a
drive, or on the river, that the wind, like a sensible presence
of God, might blow upon her, and give her fresh life to take home
with her. So little progress did she make with Hesper, that she
could not help thinking it must have been for Letty's sake she
was allowed to go to London.

Mr. and Mrs. Redmain went again to Durnmelling, but Mary begged
Hesper to leave her behind. She told her the reason, without
mentioning the name of the friend she desired to tend. Hesper
shrugged her shoulders, as much as to say she wondered at her
taste; but she did not believe that was in reality the cause of
her wish, and, setting herself to find another, concluded she did
not choose to show herself at Testbridge in her new position,
and, afraid of losing if she opposed her, let her have her way.
Nor, indeed, was she so necessary to her at Durnmelling, where
there were few visitors, and comparatively little dressing was
required: for the mere routine of such ordinary days, Jemima was
enough, who, now and then called by Mary to her aid, had proved
herself handy and capable, and had learned much. So, all through
the hottest of the late summer and autumn weather, Mary remained
in London, where every pavement seemed like the floor of a
baker's oven, and, for all the life with which the city swarmed,
the little winds that wandered through it seemed to have lost
their vitality. How she longed for the common and the fields and
the woods, where the very essence of life seemed to dwell in the
atmosphere even when stillest, and the joy that came pouring from
the throats of the birds seemed to flow first from her own soul
into them! The very streets and lanes of Testbridge looked like
paradise to Mary in Lon-don. But she never wished herself in the
shop again, although almost every night she dreamed of the glad
old time when her father was in it with her, and when, although
they might not speak from morning to night, their souls kept
talking across crowd and counters, and each was always aware of
the other's supporting presence.

Longing, however, is not necessarily pain--it may, indeed, be
intensest bliss; and, if Mary longed for the freedom of the
country, it was not to be miserable that she could not have it.
Her mere thought of it was to her a greater delight than the
presence of all its joys is to many who desire them the most.
That such things, and the possibility of such sensations from
them, should be in the world, was enough to make Mary jubilant.
But, then, she was at peace with her conscience, and had her
heart full of loving duty. Besides, an active patience is a
heavenly power. Mary could not only walk along a pavement dry and
lifeless as the Sahara, enjoying the summer that brooded all
about and beyond the city, but she bore the re-freshment of
blowing winds and running waters into Letty's hot room, with the
clanging street in front, and the little yard behind, where, from
a cord stretched across between the walls, hung a few pieces of
ill-washed linen, motionless in the glare, two plump sparrows
picking up crumbs in their shadow--into this live death Mary
would carry a tone of breeze, and sailing cloud, and swaying
tree-top. In her the life was so concentrated and active that she
was capable of communicating life--the highest of human
endowments.

One evening, as Letty was telling her how the dressmaker up
stairs had been for some time unwell, and Mary was feeling
reproachful that she had not told her before, that she might have
seen what she could do for her, they became aware, it seemed
gradually, of one softest, sweetest, faintest music-tone coming
from somewhere--but not seeming sufficiently of this world to
disclose whence. Mary went to the window: there was nothing
capable of music within sight. It came again; and intermittingly
came and came. For some time they would hear nothing at all, and
then again the most delicate of tones would creep into their
ears, bringing with it more, it seemed to Mary in the surprise of
its sweetness, than she could have believed single tone capable
of carrying. Once or twice a few consecutive sounds made a
division strangely sweet; and then again, for a time, nothing
would reach them but a note here and a note there of what she was
fain to imagine a wonderful melody. The visitation lasted for
about an hour, then ceased. Letty went to bed, and all night long
dreamed she heard the angels calling her. She woke weeping that
her time was come so early, while as yet she had tasted so little
of the pleasure of life. But the truth was, she had as yet, poor
child, got so little of the _good_ of life, that it was not
at all time for her to go.

When her hour drew near, Tom condescended--unwillingly, I am
sorry to say, for he did not take the trouble to understand her
feelings--to leave word where he might be found if he should be
wanted. Even this assuagement of her fears Letty had to plead
for; Mary's being so much with her was to him reason, and he made
it excuse, for absence; he had begun to dread Mary. Nor, when at
length he was sent for, was he in any great haste; all was well
over ere he arrived. But he was a little touched when, drawing
his face down to hers, she feebly whispered," He's as like to
you, Tom, as ever small thing was to great!" She saw the slight
emotion, and fell asleep comforted.

It was night when she woke. Mary was sitting by her.

"O Mary!" she cried, "the angels have been calling me again. Did
you hear them?"

"No," answered Mary, a little coldly, for, if ever she was
inclined to be hard, it was toward self-sentiment. "Why do you
think the angels should call you? Do you suppose them very
desirous of your company?"

"They do call people," returned Letty, almost crying; "and I
don't know why they mightn't call me. I'm not such a very wicked
person!"

Mary's heart smote her; she was refusing Letty the time God was
giving her! She could not wake her up, and, while God was waking
her, she was impatient!

"I heard the call, too, Letty," she said; "but it was not the
angels. It was the same instrument we heard the other night. Who
can there be in the house to play like that? It was clearer this
time. I thought I could listen to it a whole year."

"Why didn't you wake me?" said Letty.

"Because the more you sleep the better. And the doctor says I
mustn't let you talk. I will get you something, and then you must
go to sleep again."

Tom did not appear any more that night; and, if they had wanted
him now, they would not have known where to find him. He was
about nothing very bad--only supping with some friends--such
friends as he did not even care to tell that he had a son.

He was ashamed of being in London at this time of the year, and,
but that he had not money enough to go anywhere except to his
mother's, he would have gone, and left Letty to shift for
herself.

With his child he was pleased, and would not seldom take him for
a few moments; but, when he cried, he was cross with him, and
showed himself the unreasonable baby of the two.

The angels did not want Letty just yet, and she slowly recovered.

For Mary it was a peaceful time. She was able to read a good
deal, and, although there were no books in Mr. Redmain's house,
she generally succeeded in getting such as she wanted. She was
able also to practice as much as she pleased, for now the grand
piano was entirely at her service, and she took the opportunity
of having a lesson every day.




CHAPTER XXXV.

THE MUSICIAN.


One evening, soon after the baby's arrival, as Mary sat with him
in her lap, the sweet tones they had heard twice before came
creeping into her ears so gently that she seemed to be aware of
their presence only after they had been for some time coming and
going: she laid the baby down, and, stealing from the room,
listened on the landing. Certainly the sounds were born in the
house, but whether they came from below or above she could not
tell. Going first down the stair, and then up, she soon satisfied
herself that they came from above, and thereupon ventured a
little farther up the stair.

She had already been to see the dressmaker, whom she had come to
know through the making of Hesper's twilight robe of cloud, had
found her far from well, and had done what she could for her. But
she was in no want, and of more than ordinary independence--a
Yorkshire woman, about forty years of age, delicate, but of great
patience and courage; a plain, fair, freckled woman, with a
belief in religion rather than in God. Very strict, therefore, in
her observances, she thought a great deal more of the Sabbath
than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth,
and ten times more of her creed than of the will of God; and, had
she heard any one utter such words as I have just written, would
have said he was an atheist. She was a worthy creature,
notwithstanding, only very unpleasant if one happened to step on
the toes of a pet ignorance. Mary soon discovered that there was
no profit in talking with her on the subjects she loved most:
plainly she knew little about them, except at second hand--that
is, through the forms of other minds than her own. Such people
seem intended for the special furtherance of the saints in
patience; being utterly unassailable by reason, they are
especially trying to those who desire to stand on brotherly terms
with all men, and so are the more sensitive to the rudeness that
always goes with moral stupidity; intellectual stupidity may
coexist with the loveliness of an angel. It is one of the blessed
hopes of the world to come, that there will be none such in it.
But why so many words? I say to myself, Will one of such as I
mean recognize his portrait in my sketch? Many such have I met in
my young days, and in my old days I find they swarm still. I
could wish that all such had to earn their own bread like Ann
Byron: had she been rich, she would have been unbearable. Women
like her, when they are well to do, walk with a manly stride,
make the tails of their dresses go like the screw of a steamer
behind them, and are not unfrequently Scotch.

As Mary went up, the music ceased; but, hoping Miss Byrom would
be able to enlighten her concerning its source, she continued her
ascent, and knocked at her door. A voice, rather wooden, yet not
without character, invited her to enter.

Ann sat near the window, for, although it was quite dusk, a
little use might yet be made of the lingering ghost of the
daylight. Almost all Mary could see of her was the reflection
from the round eyes of a pair of horn spectacles.

"How do you do, Miss Byrom?" she said.

"Not at all well," answered Ann, almost in a tone of offense.

"Is there nothing I can do for you?" asked Mary.

"We are to owe no man anything but love, the apostle tells us."

"You must owe a good deal of that, then," said Mary, one part
vexed, and two parts amused, "for you don't seem to pay much of
it."

She was just beginning to be sorry for what she had said when she
was startled by a sound, very like a little laugh, which seemed
to come from behind her. She turned quickly, but, before she
could see anything through the darkness, the softest of violin-
tones thrilled the air close beside her, and then she saw, seated
on the corner of Ann's bed, the figure of a man--young or old,
she could not tell. How could he have kept so still! His bow was
wandering slowly about over the strings of his violin; but
presently, having overcome, as it seemed, with the help of his
instrument, his inclination to laugh, he ceased, and all was
still.

"I came," said Mary, turning again to Ann, "hoping you might be
able to tell me where the sweet sounds came from which we have
heard now two or three times; but I had no idea there was any one
in the room besides yourself.--They come at intervals a great
deal too long," she added, turning toward the figure in the
darkness.

"I am afraid my ear is out sometimes," said the man, mistaking
her remark. "I think it comes of the anvil."

The voice was manly, though gentle, and gave an impression of
utter directness and simplicity. It was Mary's turn, however, not
to understand, and she made no answer.

"I am very sorry," the musician went on, "if I annoyed you,
miss."

Mary was hastening to assure him that the fact was quite the
other way, when Ann prevented her.

"I told you so!" she said; "_you_ make an idol of your
foolish plaything, but other people take it only for the nuisance
it is."

"Indeed, you never were more mistaken," said Mary. "Both Mrs.
Helmer and myself are charmed with the little that reaches us. It
is, indeed, seldom one hears tones of such purity."

The player responded with a sigh of pleasure.

"Now there you are, miss," cried Ann, "a-flattering of his folly
till not a word I say will be of the smallest use!"

"If your words are not wise," said Mary, with suppressed
indignation, "the less he heeds them the better."

"It ain't wise, to my judgment, miss, to make a man think himself
something when he is nothing. It's quite enough a man should
deceive his own self, without another to come and help him."

"To speak the truth is not to deceive," replied Mary. "I have
some knowledge of music, and I say only what is true."

"What good can it be spending his time scraping horsehair athort
catgut?"

"They must fancy some good in it up in heaven," said Mary, "or
they wouldn't have so much of it there."

"There ain't no fiddles in heaven," said Ann, with indignation;
"they've nothing there but harps and trumpets." Mary turned to
the man, who had not said a word.

"Would you mind coming down with me," she said, "and playing a
little, very softly, to my friend? She has a little baby, and is
not strong. It would do her good."

"She'd better read her Bible," said Ann, who, finding she could
no longer see, was lighting a candle.

"She does read her Bible," returned Mary; "and a little music
would, perhaps, help her to read it to better purpose."

"There, Ann!" cried the player.

The woman replied with a scornful grunt.

"Two fools don't make a wise man, for all the franchise," she
said.

But Mary had once more turned toward the musician, and in the
light of the candle was met by a pair of black eyes, keen yet
soft, looking out from tinder an overhanging ridge of forehead.
The rest of the face was in shadow, but she could see by the
whiteness, through a beard that clouded all the lower part of it,
that he was smiling to himself: Mary had said what pleased him,
and his eyes sought her face, and seemed to rest on it with a
kind of trust, and a look as if he was ready to do whatever she
might ask of him.

"You will come?" said Mary.

"Yes, miss, with all my heart," he replied, and flashed a full
smile that rested upon Ann, and seemed to say he knew her not so
hard as she looked.

Rising, he tucked his violin under his arm, and showed himself
ready to follow.

"Good night, Miss Byrom," said Mary.

"Good night, miss," returned Ann, grimly. "I'm sorry for you
both, miss. But, until the spirit is poured out from on high,
it's nothing but a stumbling in the dark."

This last utterance was a reflection rather than a remark.

Mary made no reply. She did not care to have the last word; nor
did she fancy her cause lost when she had not at hand the answer
that befitted folly. She ran down the stair, and at the bottom
stood waiting her new acquaintance, who descended more slowly,
careful not to make a noise.

She could now see, by the gaslight that burned on the landing, a
little more of what the man was. He was powerfully built, rather
over middle height, and about the age of thirty. His complexion
was dark, and the hand that held the bow looked grimy. He bore
himself well, but a little stiffly, with a care over his violin
like that of a man carrying a baby. He was decidedly handsome, in
a rugged way--mouth and chin but hinted through a thick beard of
darkest brown.

"Come this way," said Mary, leading him into Letty's parlor. "I
will tell my friend you are come. Her room, you see, opens off
this, and she will hear you delightfully. Pray, take a seat."

"Thank you, miss," said the man, but remained standing.

"I have caught the bird, Letty," said Mary, loud enough for him
to hear; "and he is come to sing a little to you--if you feel
strong enough for it."

"It will do me good," said Letty. "How kind of him!"

The man, having heard, was already tuning his violin when Mary
came from the bedroom, and sat down on the sofa. The instant he
had got it to his mind, he turned, and, going to the farthest
corner of the room, closed his eyes tight, and began to play.

But how shall I describe that playing? how convey an idea of it,
however remote? I fear it is nothing less than presumption in me,
so great is my ignorance, to attempt the thing. But would it be
right, for dread of bringing shame upon me through failure, to
leave my readers without any notion of it at all? On the other
hand, I shall, at least, have the merit of daring to fail--a
merit of which I could well be ambitious.

If, then, my reader will imagine some music-loving sylph
attempting to guide the wind among the strings of an Aeolian
harp, every now and then for a moment succeeding, and then again
for a while the wind having its own way, he will gain, I think,
something like a dream-notion of the man's playing. Mary tried
hard to get hold of some clew to the combinations and sequences,
but the motive of them she could not find. Whatever their source,
there was, either in the composition itself or in his mode of
playing, not a little of the inartistic, that is, the lawless.
Yet every now and then would come a passage of exquisite melody,
owing much, however, no doubt, to the marvelous delicacy of the
player's tones, and the utterly tender expression with which he
produced them. But ever as she thought to get some insight into
the movement of the man's mind, still would she be swept away on
the storm of some change, seeming of mood incongruous.

At length came a little pause. He wiped his forehead with a blue
cotton handkerchief, and seemed ready to begin again. Mary
interrupted him with the question:

"Will you please tell me whose music you have been playing?"

He opened his eyes, which had remained closed even while he stood
motionless, and, with a smile sweeter than any she had ever seen
on such a strong face, answered:

"It's nobody's, miss."

"Do you mean you have been extemporizing all this time?"

"I don't know exactly what that means."

"You must have learned it from notes?"

"I couldn't read them if I had any to read," he answered.

"Then what an ear and what a memory you must have! How often have
you heard it?"

"Just as often as I've played it, and no oftener. Not being able
to read, and seldom hearing any music I care for, I'm forced to
be content with what runs out at my fingers when I shut my eyes.
It all comes of shutting my eyes. I couldn't play a thing but for
shutting my eyes. It's a wonderful deal that comes of shutting
your eyes! Did you never try it, miss?"

Mary was so astonished both by what he said and the simplicity
with which he said it, having clearly no notion that he was
uttering anything strange, that she was silent, and the man,
after a moment's retuning, began again to play. Then did Mary
gather all her listening powers, and brace her attention to the
tightest--but at first with no better success. And, indeed, that
was not the way to understand. It seems to me, at least, in my
great ignorance, that one can not understand music unless he is
humble toward it, and consents, if need be, not to understand.
When one is quiescent, submissive, opens the ears of the mind,
and demands of them nothing more than the hearing--when the
rising waters of question retire to their bed, and individuality
is still, then the dews and rains of music, finding the way clear
for them, soak and sink through the sands of the mind, down, far
down, below the thinking-place, down to the region of music,
which is the hidden workshop of the soul, the place where lies
ready the divine material for man to go making withal.

Weary at last with vain effort, she ceased to endeavor, and in a
little while was herself being molded by the music unconsciously
received to the further understanding of it. It wrought in her
mind pictures, not thoughts. It is possible, however, my later
knowledge may affect my description of what Mary then saw with
her mind's eye.

First there was a crowd in slow, then rapid movement. Arose cries
and entreaties. Came hurried motions, disruption, and running
feet. A pause followed. Then woke a lively melody, changing to
the prayer of some soul too grateful to find words. Next came a
bar or two of what seemed calm, lovely speech, then a few slowly
delivered chords, and all was still.

She came to herself, and then first knew that, like sleep, the
music had seized her unawares, and she had been understanding, or
at least enjoying, without knowing it. The man was approaching
her from his dark corner. His face was shining, but plainly he
did not intend more music, for his violin was already under his
arm. He made her a little awkward bow--not much more than a nod,
and turned to the door. He had it half open, and not yet could
Mary speak. For Letty, she was fast asleep.

From the top of the stair came the voice of Ann, screaming:

"Here's your hat, Joe. I knew you'd be going when you played
that. You'd have forgotten it, I know!"

Mary heard the hat come tumbling down the stair.

"Thank you, Ann," returned Joe. "Yes, I'm going. The ladies don't
care much for my music. Nobody does but myself. But, then, it's
good for me." The last two sentences were spoken in soliloquy,
but Mary heard them, for he stood with the handle of the door in
his hand. He closed it, picked up his hat, and went softly down
the stair.

The spell was broken, and Mary darted to the door. But, just as
she opened it, the outer door closed behind the strange musician,
and she had not even learned his name.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

A CHANGE.


As soon as Letty had strength enough to attend to her baby
without help, Mary, to the surprise of her mistress, and the
destruction of her theory concerning her stay in London,
presented herself at Durnmelling, found that she was more welcome
than looked for, and the same hour resumed her duties about
Hesper.

It was with curiously mingled feelings that she gazed from her
window on the chimneys of Thornwick. How much had come to her
since first, in the summer-seat at the end of the yew-hedge, Mr.
Wardour opened to her the door of literature! It was now autumn,
and the woods, to get young again, were dying their yearly death.
For the moment she felt as if she, too, had begun to grow old.
Ministration had tired her a little--but, oh! how different its
weariness from that which came of labor amid obstruction and
insult! Her heart beat a little slower, perhaps, but she could
now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least
approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She
regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She
believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever
lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe
for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which
they were made--in other and higher words, after the will of God.

But she did for a moment taste some bitterness in her cup, when,
one day, on the footpath of Testbridge, near the place where,
that memorable Sunday, she met Mr. Wardour, she met him again,
and, looking at her, and plainly recognizing her, he passed
without salutation. Like a sudden wave the blood rose to her
face, and then sank to the deeps of her heart; and from somewhere
came the conviction that one day the destiny of Godfrey Wardour
would be in her hands: he had done more for her than any but her
father; and, when that day was come, he should not find her fail
him!

She was then on her way to the shop. She did not at all relish
entering it, but, as she had a large money-interest in the
business; she ought at least, she said to herself, to pay the
place a visit. When she went in, Turnbull did not at first
recognize her, and, taking her for a customer, blossomed into
repulsive suavity. The change that came over his countenance,
when he knew her, was a shadow of such mingled and conflicting
shades that she felt there was something peculiar in it which she
must attempt to analyze. It remained hardly a moment to encounter
question, but was almost immediately replaced with a politeness
evidently false. Then, first, she began to be aware of
distrusting the man.

Asking a few questions about the business, to which he gave
answers most satisfactory, she kept casting her eyes about the
shop, unable to account for the impression the look of it made
upon her. Either her eyes had formed for themselves another
scale, and could no more rightly judge between past and present,
or the aspect of the place was different, and not so
satisfactory. Was there less in it? she asked herself--or was it
only not so well kept as when she left it? She could not tell.
Neither could she understand the profound but distant
consideration with which Mr. Turnbull endeavored to behave to
her, treating her like a stranger to whom he must, against his
inclination, manifest all possible respect, while he did not
invite her even to call at _the villa._ She bought a pair of
gloves of the young woman who seemed to occupy her place, paid
for them, and left the shop without speaking to any one else. All
the time, George was standing behind the opposite counter,
staring at her; but, much to her relief, he showed no other sign
of recognition.

Before she went to find Beenie, who was still at Testbridge, in a
cottage of her own, she felt she must think over these things,
and come, if possible, to some conclusion about them. She left
the town, therefore, and walked homeward.

What did it all mean? She knew very well they must look down on
her ten times more than ever, because of the _menial_
position in which she had placed herself, sinking thereby beyond
all pretense to be regarded as their equal. But, if that was what
the man's behavior meant, why was he so studiously--not so much
polite as respectful? That did not use to be Mr. Turnbull's way
whore he looked down upon one. And, then, what did the shadow
preceding this behavior mean? Was there not in it something more
than annoyance at the sight of her? It was with an effort he
dismissed it! She had never seen that look upon him!

Then there was the impression the shop made on her! Was there
anything in that? Somehow it certainly seemed to have a shabby
look! Was it possible anything was wrong or going wrong with the
concern? Her father had always spoken with great respect of Mr.
Turnbull's business faculties, but she knew he had never troubled
himself to, look into the books or know how they stood with the
bank. She knew also that Mr. Turnbull was greedy after money, and
that his wife was ambitious, and hated the business. But, if he
wanted to be out of it, would he not naturally keep it up to the
best, at least in appearance, that he might part with his share
in it to the better advantage?

She turned, and, walking back to the town, sought Beenie.

The old woman being naturally a gossip, Mary was hardly seated
before she began to pour out the talk of the town, in which came
presently certain rumors concerning Mr. Turnbull--mainly hints at
speculation and loss.

The result was that Mary went from Beenie to the lawyer in whose
care her father had left his affairs. Ho was an old man, and had
been ill; had no suspicion of anything being wrong, but would
look into the matter at once. She went home, and troubled herself
no more.

She had been at Durnmelling but a few days, when Mr. Redmain,
wishing to see how things were on his estate in Cornwall, and
making up his mind to run down, carelessly asked his wife if she
would accompany him: it would be only for a few days, he said;
but a breeze or two from the Atlantic would improve her
complexion. This was gracious; but he was always more polite in
the company of Lady Margaret, who continued to show him the
kindness no one else dared or was inclined to do. For some years
he had suffered increasingly from recurrent attacks of the
disease to which I have already referred; and, whatever might be
the motive of his mother-in-law's behavior, certainly, in those
attacks, it was a comfort to him to be near her. On such
occasions in London, his sole attendant was his man Mewks.

Mary was delighted to see more of her country. She had traveled
very little, but was capable of gathering ten times more from a
journey to Cornwall than most travelers from one through
Switzerland itself. The place to which they went was lonely and
lovely, and Mary, for the first few days, enjoyed it unspeakably.

But then, suddenly, as was not unusual, Mr. Redmain was taken
ill. For some reason or other, he had sent his man to London, and
the only other they had with them, besides the coachman, was
useless in such a need, while the housekeeper who lived at the
place was nearly decrepit; so that of the household Mary alone
was capable of fit attendance in the sickroom. Hesper shrunk,
almost with horror, certainly with disgust, from the idea of
having anything to do with her husband as an invalid. When she
had the choice of her company, she said, she would not choose
his. Mewks was sent for at once, but did not arrive before the
patient had had some experience of Mary's tendance; nor, after he
came, was she altogether without opportunity of ministering to
him. The attack was a long and severe one, delaying for many
weeks their return to London, where Mr. Redmain declared he must
be, at any risk, before the end of November.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

LYDGATE STEEET.


Letty's whole life was now gathered about her boy, and she
thought little, comparatively, about Tom. And Tom thought so
little about her that he did not perceive the difference. When he
came home, he was always in a hurry to be gone again. He had
always something important to do, but it never showed itself to
Letty in the shape of money. He gave her a little now and then,
of course, and she made it go incredibly far, but it was ever
with more of a grudge that he gave it. The influence over him of
Sepia was scarcely less now that she was gone; but, if she cared
for him at all, it was mainly that, being now not a little stale-
hearted, his devotion reminded her pleasurably of a time when
other passions than those of self-preservation were strongest in
her; and her favor even now tended only to the increase of Tom's
growing disappointment, for, like Macbeth, he had begun already
to consider life but a poor affair. Across the cloud of this
death gleamed, certainly, the flashing of Sepia's eyes, or the
softly infolding dawn of her smile, but only, the next hour, nay,
the next moment, to leave all darker than before. Precious is the
favor of any true, good woman, be she what else she may; but what
is the favor of one without heart or faith or self-giving? Yet is
there testimony only too strong and terrible to the demoniacal
power, enslaving and absorbing as the arms of the kraken, of an
evil woman over an imaginative youth. Possibly, did he know
beforehand her nature, he would not love her, but, knowing it
only too late, he loves and curses; calls her the worst of names,
yet can not or will not tear himself free; after a fashion he
still calls love, he loves the demon, and hates her thralldom.
Happily Tom had not reached this depth of perdition; Sepia was
prudent for herself, and knew, none better, what she was about,
so far as the near future was concerned, therefore held him at
arm's length, where Tom basked in a light that was of hell--for
what is a hell, or a woman like Sepia, but an inverted creation?
His nature, in consequence, was in all directions dissolving. He
drank more and more strong drink, fitting fuel to such his
passion, and Sepia liked to see him approach with his eyes
blazing. There are not many women like her; she is a rare type--
but not, therefore, to be passed over in silence. It is little
consolation that the man-eating tiger is a rare animal, if one of
them be actually on the path; and to the philosopher a
possibility is a fact. But the true value of the study of
abnormal development is that, in the deepest sense, such
development is not abnormal at all, but the perfected result of
the laws that avenge law-breach. It is in and through such that
we get glimpses, down the gulf of a moral volcano, to the
infernal possibilities of the human--the lawless rot of that
which, in its _attainable_ idea, is nothing less than
divine, imagined, foreseen, cherished, and labored for, by the
Father of the human. Such inverted possibility, the infernal
possibility, I mean, lies latent in every one of us, and, except
we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a
possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a
temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will
yield the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who
recognizes life solely upon his own conscious level, mocks
equally at the ideal and its antipode, incapable of recognizing
the art of Shakespeare himself as true to the human nature that
will not be human.

I have said that Letty did her best with what money Tom gave her;
but when she came to find that he had not paid the lodging for
two months; that the payment of various things he had told her to
order and he would see to had been neglected, and that the
tradespeople were getting persistent in their applications; that,
when she told him anything of the sort, he treated it at one time
as a matter of no consequence which he would speedily set right,
at another as behavior of the creditor hugely impertinent, which
he would punish by making him wait his time--her heart at length
sank within her, and she felt there was no bulwark between her
and a sea of troubles; she felt as if she lay already in the
depths of a debtor's jail. Therefore, sparing as she had been
from the first, she was more sparing than ever. Not only would
she buy nothing for which she could not pay down, having often in
consequence to go without proper food, but, even when she had a
little in hand, would live like an anchorite. She grew very thin;
and, in-deed, if she had not been of the healthiest, could not
have stood her own treatment many weeks.

Her baby soon began to show suffering, but this did not make her
alter her way, or drive her to appeal to Tom. She was ignorant of
the simplest things a mother needs to know, and never imagined
her abstinence could hurt her baby. So long as she went on
nursing him, it was all the same, she thought. He cried so much,
that Tom made it a reason with himself, and indeed gave it as one
to Letty, for not coming home at night: the child would not let
him sleep; and how was he to do his work if he had not his
night's rest? It mattered little with semi-mechanical professions
like medicine or the law, but how was a man to write articles
such as he wrote, not to mention poetry, except he had the repose
necessary to the redintegration of his exhausted brain? The baby
went on crying, and the mother's heart was torn. The woman of the
house said he must be already cutting his teeth, and recommended
some devilish sirup. Letty bought a bottle with the next money
she got, and thought it did him good-because, lessening his
appetite, it lessened his crying, and also made him sleep more
than he ought.

At last one night Tom came home very much the worse of drink, and
in maudlin affection insisted on taking the baby from its cradle.
The baby shrieked. Tom was angry with the weakling, rated him
soundly for ingratitude to "the author of his being," and shook
him roughly to teach him the good manners of the world he had
come to.

Thereat in Letty sprang up the mother, erect and fierce. She
darted to Tom, snatched the child from his arms, and turned to
carry him to the inner room. But, as the mother rose in Letty,
the devil rose in Tom. If what followed was not the doing of the
real Tom, it was the doing of the devil to whom the real Tom had
opened the door. With one stride he overtook his wife, and mother
and child lay together on the floor. I must say for him that,
even in his drunkenness, he did not strike his wife as ho would
have struck a man; it was an open-handed blow he gave her, what,
in familiar language, is called a box on the ear, but for days
she carried the record of it on her cheek in five red finger-
marks.

When he saw her on the floor, Tom's bedazed mind came to itself;
he knew what he had done, and was sobered. But, alas! even then
he thought more of the wrong he had done to himself as a
gentleman than of the grievous wound he had given his wife's
heart. He took the baby, who had ceased to cry as soon as he was
in his mother's arms, and laid him on the rug, then lifted the
bitterly weeping Letty, placed her on the sofa, and knelt beside
her--not humbly to entreat her pardon, but, as was his wont, to
justify himself by proving that all the blame was hers, and that
she had wronged him greatly in driving him to do such a thing.
This for apology poor Letty, never having had from him fuller
acknowledgment of wrong, was fain to accept. She turned on the
sofa, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and clung to him
with an utter forgiveness. But all it did for Tom was to restore
him his good opinion of himself, and enable him to go on feeling
as much of a gentleman as before.

Reconciled, they turned to the baby. He was pale, his eyes were
closed, and they could not tell whether he breathed. In a
horrible fright, Tom ran for the doctor. Before he returned with
him, the child had come to, and the doctor could discover no
injury from the fall they told him he had had. At the same time,
he said he was not properly nourished, and must have better food.

This was a fresh difficulty to Letty; it was a call for more
outlay. And now their landlady, who had throughout been very
kind, was in trouble about her own rent, and began to press for
part at least of theirs. Letty's heart seemed to labor under a
stone. She forgot that there was a thing called joy. So sad she
looked that the good woman, full of pity, assured her that, come
what might, she should not be turned out, but at the worst would
only have to go a story higher, to inferior rooms. The rent
should wait, she said, until better days. But this kindness
relieved Letty only a little, for the rent past and the rent to
come hung upon her like a cloak of lead.

Nor was even debt the worst that now oppressed her. For, possibly
from the fall, but more from the prolonged want of suitable
nourishment and wise treatment, after that terrible night, the
baby grew worse. Many were the tears the sleepless mother shed
over the sallow face and wasted limbs of her slumbering treasure
--her one antidote to countless sorrows; and many were the foolish
means she tried to restore his sinking vitality.

Mary had written to her, and she had written to Mary; but she had
said nothing of the straits to which she was reduced; that would
have been to bring blame upon Tom. But Mary, with her fine human
instinct, felt that things must be going worse with her than
before; and, when she found that her return was indefinitely
postponed by Mr. Redmain's illness, she ventured at last in her
anxiety upon a daring measure: she wrote to Mr. Wardour, telling
him she had reason to fear things were not going well with Letty
Helmer, and suggesting, in the gentlest way, whether it might not
now be time to let bygones be bygones, and make some inquiry
concerning her.

To this letter Godfrey returned no answer. For all her denial, he
had never ceased to believe that Mary had been Letty's accomplice
throughout that miserable affair; and the very name--the Letty
and the Helmer--stung him to the quick. He took it, therefore, as
a piece of utter presumption in Mary to write to him about Letty,
and that in the tone, as ho interpreted it, of one reading him a
lesson of duty. But, while he was thus indignant with Mary, he
was also vexed with Letty that she should not herself have
written to him if she was in any need, forgetting that he had
never hinted at any door of communication open between him and
her. His heart quivered at the thought that she might be in
distress; he had known for certain, he said, the fool would bring
her to misery! For himself, the thought of Letty was an ever-open
wound--with an ever-present pain, now dull and aching, now keen
and stinging. The agony of her desertion, he said, would never
cease gnawing at his heart until it was laid in the grave; like
most heathen Christians, he thought of death as the end of all
the joys, sorrows, and interests generally of this life. But,
while thus he brooded, a fierce and evil joy awoke in him at the
thought that now at last the expected hour had come when he would
heap coals of fire on her head. He was still fool enough to think
of her as having forsaken him, although he had never given her
ground for believing, and she had never had conceit enough to
imagine, that he cared the least for her person. If he could but
let her have a glimmer of what she had lost in losing him! She
knew what she had gained in Tom Helmer.

He passed a troubled night, dreamed painfully, and started awake
to renewed pain. Before morning he had made up his mind to take
the first train to London. But he thought far more of being her
deliverer than of bringing her deliverance.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

GODFREY AND LETTY.


It was a sad, gloomy, kindless November night, when Godfrey
arrived in London. The wind was cold, the pavements were cold,
the houses seemed to be not only cold but feeling it. The very
dust that blow in his face was cold. Now cold is a powerful ally
of the commonplace, and imagination therefore was not very busy
in the bosom of Godfrey Wardour as he went to find Letty Helmer,
which was just as well, in the circumstances. He was cool to the
very heart when he walked up to the door indicated by Mary, and
rung the bell: Mrs. Helmer was at home: would he walk up stairs?

It was not a house of ceremonies; he was shown up and up and into
the room where she sat, without a word carried before to prepare
her for his visit. It was so dark that he could see nothing but
the figure of one at work by a table, on which stood a single
candle. There was but a spark of fire in the dreary grate, and
Letty was colder than any one could know, for she was at the
moment making down the last woolly garment she had, in the vain
hope of warming her baby.

She looked up. She had thought it was the landlady, and had
waited for her to speak. She gazed for a moment in bewilderment,
saw who it was, and jumped up half frightened, half ready to go
wild with joy. All the memories of Godfrey rushed in a confused
heap upon her, and overwhelmed her. She ran to him, and the same
moment was in his arms, with her head on his shoulder, weeping
tears of such gladness as she had not known since the first week
of her marriage.

Neither spoke for some time; Letty could not because she was
crying, and Godfrey would not because he did not want to cry.
Those few moments were pure, simple happiness to both of them; to
Letty, because she had loved him from childhood, and hoped that
all was to be as of old between them; to Godfrey, because, for
the moment, he had forgotten himself, and had neither thought of
injury nor hope of love, remembering only the old days and the
Letty that used to be. It may seem strange that, having never
once embraced her all the time they lived together, he should do
so now; but Letty's love would any time have responded to the
least show of affection, and when, at the sight of his face, into
which memory had called up all his tenderness, she rushed into
his arms, how could he help kissing her? The pity was that he had
not kissed her long before. Or was it a pity? I think not.

But the embrace could not be a long one. Godfrey was the first to
relax its strain, and Letty responded with an instant collapse;
for instantly she feared she had done it all, and disgusted
Godfrey. But he led her gently to the sofa, and sat down beside
her on the hard old slippery horsehair. Then first he perceived
what a change had passed upon her. Pale was she, and thin, and
sad, with such big eyes, and the bone tightening the skin upon
her forehead! He felt as if she were a spectre-Letty, not the
Letty he had loved. Glancing up, she caught his troubled gaze.

"I am not ill, Cousin Godfrey," she said. "Do not look at me so,
or I shall cry again. You know you never liked to see me cry."

"My poor girl!" said Godfrey, in a voice which, if he had not
kept it lower than natural, would have broken, "you are
suffering."

"Oh, no, I'm not," replied Letty, with a pitiful effort at the
cheerful; "I am only so glad to see you again, Cousin Godfrey."

She sat on the edge of the sofa, and had put her open hands, palm
to palm, between her knees, in a childish way, looking like one
chidden, who did not deserve it, but was ready to endure. For a
moment Godfrey sat gazing at her, with troubled heart and
troubled looks, then between his teeth muttered, "Damn the
rascal!"

Letty sat straight up, and turned upon him eyes of appeal,
scared, yet ready to defend. Her hands were now clinched, one on
each side of her; she was poking the little fists into the squab
of the sofa.

"Cousin Godfrey!" she cried, "if you mean Tom, you must not, you
must not. I will go away if you speak a word against him. I will;
I will.--I _must,_ you know!"

Godfrey made no reply--neither apologized nor sought to cover.

"Why, child!" he said at last, "you are half starved!"

The pity and tenderness of both word and tone were too much for
her. She had not been at all pitying herself, but such an
utterance from the man she loved like an elder brother so wrought
upon her enfeebled condition that she broke into a cry. She
strove to suppress her emotion; she fought with it; in her agony
she would have rushed from the room, had not Godfrey caught her,
drawn her down beside him, and kept her there. "You shall not
leave me!" he said, in that voice Letty had always been used to
obey. "Who has a right to know how things go with you, if I have
not? Come, you must tell me all about it."

"I have nothing to tell, Cousin Godfrey," she replied with some
calmness, for Godfrey's decision had enabled her to conquer
herself, "except that baby is ill, and looks as if he would never
get better, and it is like to break my heart. Oh, he is such a
darling, Cousin Godfrey!"

"Let me see him," said Godfrey, in his heart detesting the child
--the visible sign that another was nearer to Letty than he.

She jumped up, almost ran into the next room, and, coming back
with her little one, laid him in Godfrey's arms. The moment he
felt the weight of the little, sad-looking, sleeping thing, he
grew human toward him, and saw in him Letty and not Tom.

"Good God! the child is starving, too," he exclaimed.

"Oh, no, Cousin Godfrey!" cried Letty; "he is not starving. He
had a fresh-laid egg for breakfast this morning, and some
arrowroot for dinner, and some bread and milk for tea--"

"London milk!" said Godfrey.

"Well, it is not like the milk in the dairy at Thornwick,"
admitted Letty. "If he had milk like that, he would soon be
well!"

But Godfrey dared not say, "Bring him to Thornwick": he knew his
mother too well for that!

"When were you anywhere in the country?" he asked. In a negative
kind of way he was still nursing the baby.

"Not since we were married," she answered, sadly. "You see, poor
Tom can't afford it."

Now Godfrey happened to have heard, "from the best authority,"
that Tom's mother was far from illiberal to him.

"Mrs. Helmer allows him so much a year--does she not?" he said.

"I know he gets money from her, but it can't be much," she
answered.

Godfrey's suspicions against Tom increased every moment. He must
learn the truth. He would have it, if by an even cruel
experiment! He sat a moment silent--then said, with assumed
cheerfulness:

"Well, Letty, I suppose, for the sake of old times, you will give
me some dinner?"

Then, indeed, her courage gave way. She turned from him, laid her
head on the end of the sofa, and sobbed so that the room seemed
to shake with the convulsions of her grief. "Letty," said
Godfrey, laying his hand on her head, "it is no use any more
trying to hide the truth. I don't want any dinner; in fact, I
dined long ago. But you would not be open with me, and I was
forced to find out for myself: you have not enough to eat, and
you know it. I will not say a word about who is to blame--for
anything I know, it may be no one--I am sure it is not you. But
this must not go on! See, I have brought you a little pocket-
book. I will call again tomorrow, and you will tell me then how
you like it."

He laid the pocket-book on the table. There was ten times as much
in it as ever Letty had had at once. But she never knew what was
in it. She rose with instant resolve. All the woman in her waked
at once. She felt that a moment was come when she must be
resolute, or lose her hold on life.

"Cousin Godfrey," she said, in a tone he scarcely recognized as
hers--it frightened him as if it came from a sepulchre--"if you
do not take that purse away, I will throw it in the fire without
opening it! If my husband can not give me enough to eat, I can
starve as well as another. If you loved Tom, it would be
different, but you hate him, and I will have nothing from you.
Take it away, Cousin Godfrey."

Mortified, hurt, miserable, Godfrey took the purse, and, without
a word, walked from the room. Somewhere down in his secret heart
was dawning an idea of Letty beyond anything he used to think of
her, but in the mean time he was only blindly aware that his
heart had been shot through and through. Nor was this the time
for him to reflect that, under his training, Letty, even if he
had married her, would never have grown to such dignity.

It was, indeed, only in that moment she had become capable of the
action. She had been growing as none, not Mary, still less
herself, knew, under the heavy snows of affliction, and this was
her first blossom. Not many of my readers will mistake me, I
trust. Had it been in Letty pride that refused help from such an
old friend, that pride I should count no blossom, but one of the
meanest rags that ever fluttered to scare the birds. But the
dignity of her refusal was in this--that she would accept nothing
in which her husband had and could have no human, that is, no
spiritual share. She had married him because she loved him, and
she would hold by him wherever that might lead her: not wittingly
would she allow the finest edge, even of ancient kindness, to
come between her Tom and herself! To accept from her cousin
Godfrey the help her husband ought to provide her, would be to
let him, however innocently, step into his place! There was no
reasoning in her resolve: it was allied to that spiritual insight
which, in simple natures, and in proportion to their simplicity,
approaches or amounts to prophecy. As the presence of death will
sometimes change even an ordinary man to a prophet, in times of
sore need the childlike nature may well receive a vision
sufficing to direct the doubtful step. Letty felt that the taking
of that money would be the opening of a gulf to divide her and
Tom for ever.

The moment Godfrey was out of the room she cast herself on the
floor, and sobbed as if her heart must break. But her sobs were
tearless. And, oh, agony of agonies! unsought came the
conviction, and she could not send it away--to this had sunk her
lofty idea of her Tom!--that he would have had her take the
money! More than once or twice, in the ill-humors that followed a
forced hilarity, he had forgotten his claims to being a gentleman
so far as--not exactly to reproach her with having brought him to
poverty--but to remind her that, if she was poor, she was no
poorer than she had been when dependent on the charity of a
distant relation!

The baby began to cry. She rose and took him from the sofa where
Godfrey had laid him when he was getting out the pocket-book,
held him fast to her bosom, as if by laying their two aching
lives together they might both be healed, and, rocking him to and
fro, said to herself, for the first time, that her trouble was
greater than she could bear. "O baby! baby! baby!" she cried, and
her tears streamed on the little wan face. But, as she sat with
him in her arms, the blessed sleep came, and the storm sank to a
calm.




CHAPTER XXXIX.

RELIEF.


It was dark, utterly dark, when she woke. For a minute she could
not remember where she was. The candle had burned out: it must be
late. The baby was on her lap--still, very still. One faint gleam
of satisfaction crossed her "during dark" at the thought that he
slept so peacefully, hidden from the gloom which, somehow,
appeared to be all the same gloom outside and inside of her. In
that gloom she sat alone.

Suddenly a prayer was in her heart. It was moving there as of
itself. It had come there by no calling of it thither, by no
conscious will of hers. "O God," she cried, "I am desolate!--Is
there no help for me?" And therewith she knew that she had
prayed, and knew that never in her life had she prayed before.

She started to her feet in an agony: a horrible fear had taken
possession of her. With one arm she held the child fast to her
bosom, with the other hand searched in vain to find a match. And
still, as she searched, the baby seemed to grow heavier upon her
arm, and the fear sickened more and more at her heart.

At last she had light! and the face of the child came out of the
darkness. But the child himself had gone away into it. The
Unspeakable had come while she slept--had come and gone, and
taken her child with him. What was left of him was no more good
to kiss than the last doll of her childhood!

When Tom came home, there was his wife on the floor as if dead,
and a little way from her the child, dead indeed, and cold with
death. He lifted Letty and carried her to the bed, amazed to find
how light she was: it was long since he had had her thus in his
arms. Then he laid her dead baby by her side, and ran to rouse
the doctor. He came, and pronounced the child quite dead--from
lack of nutrition, he said. To see Tom, no one could have helped
contrasting his dress and appearance with the look and
surroundings of his wife; but no one would have been ready to lay
blame on him; and, as for himself, he was not in the least awake
to the fact of his guilt.

The doctor gave the landlady, who had responded at once to Tom's
call, full directions for the care of the bereaved mother; Tom
handed her the little money he had in his pocket, and she
promised to do her best. And she did it; for she was one of
those, not a few, who, knowing nothing of religion toward God,
are yet full of religion toward their fellows, and with the Son
of Man that goes a long way. As soon as it was light, Tom went to
see about the burying of his baby.

He betook himself first to the editor of "The Firefly," but had
to wait a long time for his arrival at the office. He told him
his baby was dead, and he wanted money. It was forthcoming at
once; for literary men, like all other artists, are in general as
ready to help each other as the very poor themselves. There is
less generosity, I think, among business-men than in any other
class. The more honor to the exceptions!

"But," said the editor, who had noted the dry, burning palm, and
saw the glazed, fiery eye of Tom, "my dear fellow, you ought to
be in bed yourself. It's no use taking on about the poor little
kid: _you_ couldn't help it. Go home to your wife, and tell
her she's got you to nurse; and, if she's in any fix, tell her to
come to me."

Tom went home, but did not give his wife the message. She lay all
but insensible, never asked for anything, or refused anything
that was offered her, never said a word about her baby, or about
Tom, or seemed to be more than when she lay in her mother's lap.
Her baby was buried, and she knew nothing of it. Not until nine
days were over did she begin to revive.

For the first few days, Tom, moved with undefined remorse, tried
to take a part in nursing her. She took things from him, as she
did from the landlady, without heed or recognition. Just once,
opening suddenly her eyes wide upon him, she uttered a feeble
wail of "_Baby!_" and, turning her head, did not look at him
again. Then, first, Tom's conscience gave him a sharp sting.

He was far from well. The careless and in many respects dissolute
life he had been leading had more than begun to tell on a
constitution by no means strong, but he had never become aware of
his weakness nor had ever felt really ill until now.

But that sting, although the first sharp one, was not his first
warning of a waking conscience. Ever since he took his place at
his wife's bedside, he had been fighting off the conviction that
he was a brute. He would not, he could not believe it. What! Tom
Helmer, the fine, indubitable fellow! such as he had always known
himself!--he to cower before his own consciousness as a man
unworthy, and greatly to be despised! The chaos was come again!
And, verily, chaos was there, but not by any means newly come.
And, moreover, when chaos begins to be conscious of itself, then
is the dawn of an ordered world at hand. Nay, the creation of it
is already begun, and the pangs of the waking conscience are the
prophecy of the new birth.

With that pitiful cry of his wife after her lost child, disbelief
in himself got within the lines of his defense; he could do no
more, and began to loathe that conscious self which had hitherto
been his pride.

Whatever the effect of illness may be upon the temper of some, it
is most certainly an ally of the conscience. All pains, indeed,
and all sorrows, all demons, yea, and all sins themselves under
the suffering care of the highest minister, are but the ministers
of truth and righteousness. I never came to know the condition of
such as seemed exceptionally afflicted but I seemed to see reason
for their affliction, either in exceptional faultiness of
character or the greatness of the good it was doing them.

But conscience reacts on the body--for sickness until it is
obeyed, for health thereafter. The moment conscience spoke thus
plainly to Tom, the little that was left of his physical
endurance gave way, his illness got the upper hand, and he took
to his bed--all he could have for bed, that is--namely, the sofa
in the sitting-room, widened out with chairs, and a mattress over
all. There he lay, and their landlady had enough to do. Not that
either of her patients was exacting; they were both too ill and
miserable for that. It is the self-pitiful, self-coddling invalid
that is exacting. Such, I suspect, require something sharper
still.

Tom groaned and tossed, and cursed himself, and soon passed into
delirium. Straightway his visions, animate with shame and
confusion of soul, were more distressing than even his ready
tongue could have told. Dead babies and ghastly women pursued him
everywhere. His fever increased. The cries of terror and dismay
that he uttered reached the ears of his wife, and were the first
thing that roused her from her lethargy. She rose from her bed,
and, just able to crawl, began to do what she could for him. If
she could but get near enough to him, the husband would yet be
dearer than any child. She had him carried to the bed, and
thereafter took on the sofa what rest there was for her. To and
fro between bed and sofa she crept, let the landlady say what she
might, gave him all the food he could be got to take, cooled his
burning hands and head, and cried over him because she could not
take him on her lap like the baby that was gone. Once or twice,
in a quieter interval, he looked at her pitifully, and seemed
about to speak; but the back-surging fever carried far away the
word of love for which she listened so eagerly. The doctor came
daily, but Tom grew worse, and Letty could not get well.




CHAPTER XL.

GODFREY AND SEPIA.


When the Redmains went to Cornwall, Sepia was left at
Durnmelling, in the expectation of joining them in London within
a fortnight at latest. The illness of Mr. Redmain, however,
caused her stay to be prolonged, and she was worn out with
_ennui_. The self she was so careful over was not by any
means good company: not seldom during her life had she found
herself capable of almost anything to get rid of it, short of
suicide or repentance. This autumn, at Durnmelling, she would
even, occasionally, with that object, when the weather was fine,
go for a solitary walk--a thing, I need not say, she hated in
itself, though now it was her forlorn hope, in the poor
possibility of falling in with some distraction. But the hope was
not altogether a vague one; for was there not a man somewhere
underneath those chimneys she saw over the roof of the laundry?
She had never spoken to him, but Hesper and she had often talked
about him, and often watched him ride--never man more to her
mind. In her wanderings she had come upon the breach in the ha-
ha, and, clambering up, found herself on the forbidden ground of
a neighbor whom the family did not visit. To no such folly would
Sepia be a victim.

The analysis of such a nature as hers, with her story to set it
forth, would require a book to itself, and I must happily content
myself with but a fact here and there in her history.

In one of her rambles on his ground she had her desire, and met
Godfrey Wardour. He lifted his hat, and she stopped and addressed
him by way of apology.

"I am afraid you think me very rude, Mr. Wardour," she said. "I
know I am trespassing, but this field of yours is higher than the
ground about Durnmelling, and seems to take pounds off the weight
of the atmosphere."

For all he had gone through, Godfrey was not yet less than
courteous to ladies. He assured Miss Yolland that Thornwick was
as much at her service as if it were a part of Durnmelling.
"Though, indeed," he added, with a smile, "it would be more
correct to say, 'as if Durnmelling were a part of Thornwick'--for
that was the real state of the case once upon a time."

The statement interested or seemed to interest Miss Yolland,
giving rise to many questions; and a long conversation ensued.
Suddenly she woke, or seemed to wake, to the consciousness that
she had forgotten herself and the proprieties together: hastily,
and to all appearance with some confusion, she wished him a good
morning; but she was not too much confused to thank him again for
the permission he had given her to walk on his ground.

It was not by any intention on the part of Godfrey that they met
several times after this; but they always had a little
conversation before they parted; nor did Sepia find any
difficulty in getting him sufficiently within their range to make
him feel the power of her eyes. She was too prudent, however, to
bring to bear upon any man all at once the full play of her
mesmeric battery; and things had got no further when she went to
London--a week or two before the return of the Redmains,
ostensibly to get things in some special readiness for Hesper;
but that this may have been a pretense appears possible from the
fact that Mary came from Cornwall on the same mission a few days
later.

I have just mentioned an acquaintance of Sepia's, who attracted
the notice and roused the peculiar interest of Mr. Redmain,
because of a look he saw pass betwixt them. This man spoke both
English and French with a foreign accent, and gave himself out as
a Georgian--Count Galofta, he called himself: I believe he was a
prince in Paris. At this time he was in London, and, during the
ten days that Sepia was alone, came to see her several times--
called early in the forenoon first, the next day in the evening,
when they went together to the opera, and once came and staid
late. Whether from her dark complexion making her look older than
she was, or from the subduing air which her experience had given
her, or merely from the fact that she belonged to nobody much,
Miss Yolland seemed to have _carte blanche_ to do as she
pleased, and come and go when and where she liked, as one knowing
well enough how to take care of herself.

Mary, arriving unexpectedly at the house in Glammis Square, met
him in the hall as she entered: he had just taken leave of Sepia,
who was going up the stair at the moment. Mary had never seen him
before, but something about him caused her to look at him again
as he passed.

Somehow, Tom also had discovered Sepia's return, and had gone to
see her more than once.

When Mr. and Mrs. Redmain arrived, there was so much to be done
for Hesper's wardrobe that, for some days, Mary found it
impossible to go and see Letty. Her mistress seemed harder to
please than usual, and more doubtful of humor than ever before.
This may have arisen--but I doubt it--from the fact that, having
gone to church the Sunday before they left, she had there heard a
different sort of sermon from any she had heard in her life
before: sermons have something to do with the history of the
world, however many of them may be no better than a withered leaf
in the blast.

The morning after her arrival, Hesper, happening to find herself
in want of Mary's immediate help, instead of calling her as she
generally did, opened the door between their rooms, and saw Mary
on her knees by her bedside. Now, Hesper had heard of saying
prayers--night and morning both--and, when a child, had been
expected, and indeed compelled, to say her prayers; but to be
found on one's knees in the middle of the day looked to her a
thing exceedingly odd. Mary, in truth, was not much in the way of
kneeling at such a time: she had to pray much too often to kneel
always, and God was too near her, wherever she happened to be,
for the fancy that she must seek him in any particular place; but
so it happened now. She rose, a little startled rather than
troubled, and followed her mistress into her room.

"I am sorry to have disturbed you, Mary," said Hesper, herself a
little annoyed, it is not quite easy to say why; "but people do
not generally say their prayers in the middle of the day."

"I say mine when I need to say them," answered Mary, a little
cross that Hesper should take any notice. She would rather the
thing had not occurred, and it was worse to have to talk about
it.

"For my part, I don't see any good in being righteous overmuch,"
said Hesper.

I wonder if there was another saying in the Bible she would have
been so ready to quote!

"I don't know what that means," returned Mary. "I believe it is
somewhere in the Bible, but I am sure Jesus never said it, for he
tells us to be righteous as our Father in heaven is righteous."

"But the thing is impossible," said Hesper. "How is one with such
claims on her as I have, to attend to these things? Society has
claims: no one denies that."

"And has God none?" asked Mary.

"Many people think now there is no God at all," returned Hesper,
with an almost petulant expression.

"If there is no God, that settles the question," answered Mary.
"But, if there should be one, how then?"

"Then I am sure he would never be hard on one like me. I do just
like other people. One must do as people do. If there is one
thing that must be avoided more than another, it is peculiarity.
How ridiculous it would be of any one to set herself against
society!"

"Then you think the Judge will be satisfied if you say, 'Lord, I
had so many names in my visiting-book, and so many invitations I
could not refuse, that it was impossible for me to attend to
those things'?"

"I don't see that I'm at all worse than other people," persisted
Hesper. "I can't go and pretend to be sorry for sins I should
commit again the next time there was a necessity. I don't see
what I've got to repent of."

Nothing had been said about repentance: here, I imagine, the
sermon may have come in.

"Then, of course, you can't repent," said Mary.

Hesper recovered herself a little.

"I am glad you see the thing as I do," she said.

"I don't see it at all as you do, ma'am," answered Mary, gently.

"Why!" exclaimed Hesper, taken by surprise, "what have I got to
repent of?"

"Do you really want me to say what I think?" asked Mary.

"Of course, I do," returned Hesper, getting angry, and at the
same time uneasy: she knew Mary's freedom of speech upon
occasion, but felt that to draw back would be to yield the point.
"What have I done to be ashamed of, pray?"

Some ladies are ready to plume themselves upon not having been
guilty of certain great crimes. Some thieves, I dare say, console
themselves that they have never committed murder.

"If I had married a man I did not love," answered Mary, "I should
be more ashamed of myself than I can tell."

"That is the way of looking at such things in the class you
belong to, I dare say," rejoined Hesper; "but with us it is quite
different. There is no necessity laid upon _you. Our_
position obliges us."

"But what if God should not see it as you do?"

"If that is all you have got to bring against me!--" said Hesper,
with a forced laugh.

"But that is not all," replied Mary. "When you married, you
promised many things, not one of which you have ever done."

"Really, Mary, this is intolerable!" cried Hesper.

"I am only doing what you asked me, ma'am," said Mary. "And I
have said nothing that every one about Mr. Redmain does not know
as well as I do."

Hesper wished heartily she had never challenged Mary's judgment.

"But," she resumed, more quietly, "how could you, how could any
one, how could God himself, hard as he is, ask me to fulfill the
part of a loving wife to a man like Mr. Redmain?--There is no use
mincing matters with _you,_ Mary."

"But you promised," persisted Mary. "It belongs, besides, to the
very idea of marriage."

"There are a thousand promises made every day which nobody is
expected to keep. It is the custom, the way of the world! How
many of the clergy, now, believe the things they put their names
to?"

"They must answer for themselves. We are not clergymen, but
women, who ought never to say a thing except we mean it, and,
when we have said it, to stick to it."

"But just look around you, and see how many there are in
precisely the same position! Will you dare to say they are all
going to be lost because they do not behave like angels to their
brutes of husbands?"

"I say, they have got to repent of behaving to their husbands as
their husbands behave to them."

"And what if they don't?"

Mary paused a little.

"Do you expect to go to heaven, ma'am?" she asked

"I hope so."

"Do you think you will like it?"

"I must say, I think it will be rather dull."

"Then, to use your own word, you must be very like lost anyway.
There does not seem to be a right place for you anywhere, and
that is very like being lost--is it not?"

Hesper laughed.

"I am pretty comfortable where I am," she said.

"Husband and all!" thought Mary, but she did not say that. What
she did say was:

"But you know you can't stay here. God is not going to keep up
this way of things for you; can you ask it, seeing you don't care
a straw what he wants of you? But I have sometimes thought, What
if hell be just a place where God gives everybody everything she
wants, and lets everybody do whatever she likes, without once
coming nigh to interfere! What a hell that would be! For God's
presence in the very being, and nothing else, is bliss. That,
then, would be altogether the opposite of heaven, and very much
the opposite of this world. Such a hell would go on, I suppose,
till every one had learned to hate every one else in the same
world with her."

This was beyond Hesper, and she paid no attention to it.

"You can never, in your sober senses, Mary," she said, "mean that
God requires of me to do things for Mr. Redmain that the servants
can do a great deal better! That would be ridiculous--not to
mention that I oughtn't and couldn't and wouldn't do them for any
man!"

"Many a woman," said Mary, with a solemnity in her tone which she
did not intend to appear there, "has done many more trying things
for persons of whom she knew nothing."

"I dare say! But such women go in for being saints, and that is
not my line. I was not made for that."

"You were made for that, and far more," said Mary.

"There are such women, I know," persisted Hesper; "but I do not
know how they find it possible."

"I can tell you how they find it possible. They love every human
being just because he is human. Your husband might be a demon
from the way you behave to him."

"I suppose _you_ find it agreeable to wait upon him: he is
civil to you, I dare say!"

"Not very," replied Mary, with a smile; "but the person who can
not bear with a sick man or a baby is not fit to be a woman."

"You may go to your own room," said Hesper.

For the first time, a feeling of dislike to Mary awoke in the
bosom of her mistress--very naturally, _all_ my readers will
allow. The next few days she scarcely spoke to her, sending
directions for her work through Sepia, who discharged the office
with dignity.




CHAPTER XLI.

THE HELPER.


At length one morning, when she believed Mrs. Redmain would not
rise before noon, Mary felt she must go and see Letty. She did
not find her in the quarters where she had left her, but a story
higher, in a mean room, sitting with her hands in her lap. She
did not lift her eyes when Mary entered: where hope is dead,
curiosity dies. Not until she had come quite near did she raise
her head, and then she seemed to know nothing of her. When she
did recognize her, she held out her hand in a mechanical way, as
if they were two specters met in a miserable dream, in which they
were nothing to each other, and neither could do, or cared to do,
anything for the other.

"My poor Letty!" cried Mary, greatly shocked, "what has come to
you? Are you not glad to see me? Has anything happened to Tom?"

She broke into a low, childish wail, and for a time that was all
Mary heard. Presently, however, she became aware of a feeble
moaning in the adjoining chamber, the sound of a human sea in
trouble--mixed with a wandering babble, which to Letty was but as
the voice of her own despair, and to Mary was a cry for help. She
abandoned the attempt to draw anything from Letty, and went into
the next room, the door of which stood wide. There lay Tom, but
so changed that Mary took a moment to be certain it was he. Going
softly to him, she laid her hand on his head. It was burning. He
opened his eyes, but she saw their sense was gone. She went back
to Letty, and, sitting down beside her, put her arm about her,
and said:

"Why didn't you send for me, Letty? I would have come to you at
once. I will come now, to-night, and help you to nurse him. Where
is the baby?"

Letty gave a shriek, and, starting from her chair, walked wildly
about the room, wringing her hands. Mary went after her, and
taking her in her arms, said:

"Letty, dear, has God taken your baby?"

Letty gave her a lack-luster look.

"Then," said Mary, "he is not far away, for we are all in God's
arms."

But what is the use of the most sovereign of medicines while they
stand on the sick man's table? What is the mightiest of truths so
long as it is not believed? The spiritually sick still mocks at
the medicine offered; he will not know its cure. Mary saw that,
for any comfort to Letty, God was nowhere. It went to her very
heart. Death and desolation and the enemy were in possession. She
turned to go, that she might return able to begin her contest
with ruin. Letty saw that she was going, and imagined her
offended and abandoning her to her misery. She flew to her,
stretching out her arms like a child, but was so feeble that she
tripped and fell. Mary lifted her, and laid her wailing on her
couch.

"Letty," said Mary, "you didn't think I was going to leave you!
But I must go for an hour, perhaps two, to make arrangements for
staying with you till Tom is over the worst."

Then Letty clasped her hands in her old, beseeching way, and
looked up with a faint show of comfort.

"Be courageous, Letty," said Mary. "I shall be back as soon as
ever I can. God has sent me to you."

She drove straight home, and heard that Mrs. Redmain was annoyed
that she had gone out.

"I offered to dress her," said Jemima; "and she knows I can quite
well; but she would not get up till you came, and made me fetch
her a book. So there she is, a-waiting for you!"

"I am sorry," said Mary; "but I had to go, and she was fast
asleep."

When she entered her room, Hesper gave her a cold glance over the
top of her novel, and went on with her reading. Mary proceeded to
get her things ready for dressing. But by this time she had got
interested in the story.

"I shall not get up yet," she said.

"Then, please, ma'am," replied Mary, "would you mind letting
Jemima dress you? I want to go out again, and should be glad if
you could do without me for some days. My friend's baby is dead,
and both she and her husband are very ill."

Hesper threw down her book, and her eyes flamed.

"What do you mean by using me so, Miss Marston?" she said.

"I am very sorry to put you to inconvenience," answered Mary;
"but the husband seems dying, and the wife is scarcely able to
crawl."

"I have nothing to do with it," interrupted Hesper. "When you
made it necessary for me to part with my maid, you undertook to
perform her duties. I did not engage you as a sick-nurse for
other people."

"'No, ma'am," replied Mary; "but this is an extreme case, and I
can not believe you will object to my going."

"I do object. How, pray, is the world to go on, if this kind of
thing be permitted! I may be going out to dinner, or to the opera
to-night, for anything you know, and who is there to dress me?
No; on principle, and for the sake of example, I will not let you
go."

"I thought," said Mary, not a little disappointed in Hesper, "I
did not stand to you quite in the relation of an ordinary
servant."

"Certainly you do not: I look for a little more devotion from you
than from a common, ungrateful creature who thinks only of
herself. But you are all alike."

More and more distressed to find one she had loved so long show
herself so selfish, Mary's indignation had almost got the better
of her. But a little heightening of her color was all the show it
made.

"Indeed, it is quite necessary, ma'am," she persisted, "that I
should go."

"The law has fortunately made provision against such behavior,"
said Hesper. "You can not leave without giving me a month's
notice."

"The understanding on which I came to you was very different,"
said Mary, sadly.

"It was; but, since then, you consented to become my maid."

"It is ungenerous to take advantage of that," returned Mary,
growing angry again.

"I have to protect myself and the world in general from the
consequences that must follow were such lawless behavior allowed
to pass."

Hesper spoke with calm severity, and Mary, making up her mind,
answered now with almost equal calmness.

"The law was made for both sides, ma'am; and, as you bring the
law to me, I will take refuge in the law. It is, I believe, a
month's warning or a month's wages; and, as I have never had any
wages, I imagine I am at liberty to go. Good-by, ma'am."

Hesper made her no answer, and Mary left the room. She went to
her own, stuffed her immediate necessities into a bag, let
herself out of the house, called a cab, and, with a great lump in
her throat, drove to the help of Letty.

First she had a talk with the landlady, and learned all she could
tell. Then she went up, and began to make things as comfortable
as she could: all was in sad disorder and neglect.

With the mere inauguration of cleanliness, and the first dawn of
coming order, the courage of Letty began to revive a little. The
impossibility of doing all that ought to be done, had, in her
miserable weakness, so depressed her that she had not done even
as much as she could--except where Tom was immediately concerned:
there she had not failed of her utmost.

Mary next went to the doctor to get instructions, and then to buy
what things were most wanted. And now she almost wished Mrs.
Redmain had paid her for her services, for she must write to Mr.
Turnbull for money, and that she disliked. But by the very next
post she received, inclosed in a business memorandum in George's
writing, the check for fifty pounds she had requested.

She did not dare write to Tom's mother, because she was certain,
were she to come up, her presence would only add to the misery,
and take away half the probability of his recovery and of
Letty's, too. In the case of both, nourishment was the main
thing; and to the fit providing and the administering of it she
bent her energy.

For a day or two, she felt at times as if she could hardly get
through what she had undertaken; but she soon learned to drop
asleep at any moment, and wake immediately when she was wanted;
and thereafter her strength was by no means so sorely tried.

Under her skillful nursing--skillful, not from experience, but
simply from her faith, whence came both conscience of and
capacity for doing what the doctor told her--things went well. It
is from their want of this faith, and their consequent arrogance
and conceit, that the ladies who aspire to help in hospitals give
the doctors so much trouble: they have not yet learned
_obedience,_ the only path to any good, the one essential to
the saving of the world. One who can not obey is the merest
slave--essentially and in himself a slave. The crisis of Tom's
fever was at length favorably passed, but the result remained
doubtful. By late hours and strong drink, he had done not a
little to weaken a constitution, in itself, as I have said, far
from strong; while the unrest of what is commonly and foolishly
called a bad conscience, with misery over the death of his child
and the conduct which had disgraced him in his own eyes and
ruined his wife's happiness, combined to retard his recovery.

While he was yet delirious, and grief and shame and consternation
operated at will on his poetic nature, the things he kept saying
over and over were very pitiful; but they would have sounded more
miserable by much in the ears of one who did not look so far
ahead as Mary. She, trained to regard all things in their true
import, was rejoiced to find him loathing his former self, and
beyond the present suffering saw the gladness at hand for the
sorrowful man, the repenting sinner. Had she been mother or
sister to him, she could hardly have waited on him with more
devotion or tenderness.

One day, as his wife was doing some little thing for him, he took
her hand in his feeble grasp, and pressing it to his face, wet
with the tears of reviving manhood, said:

"We might have been happy together, Letty, if I had but known how
much you were worth, and how little I was worth myself!--Oh me!
oh me!"

He burst into an incontrollable wail that tortured Letty with its
likeness to the crying of her baby.

"Tom! my own darling Tom!" she cried, "when you speak as if I
belonged to you, it makes me as happy as a queen. When you are
better, you will be happy, too, dear. Mary says you will."

"O Letty!" he sobbed--"the baby!"

"The baby's all right, Mary says; and, some day, she says, he
will run into your arms, and know you for his father."

"And I shall be ashamed to look at him!" said Tom.

An hour or so after, he woke from a short sleep, and his eyes
sought Letty's watching face.

"I have seen baby," he said, "and he has forgiven me. I dare say
it was only a dream," he added, "but somehow it makes me happier.
At least, I know how the thing might be."

"It was true, whether it was but a dream or something more," said
Mary, who happened to be by.

"Thank you, Mary," he returned. "You and Letty have saved me from
what I dare not think of! I could die happy now--if it weren't
for one thing."

"What is that?" asked Mary.

"I am ashamed to say," he replied, "but I ought to say it and
bear the shame, for the man who does shamefully ought to be
ashamed. It is that, when I am in my grave--or somewhere else,
for I know Mary does not like people to talk about being in their
graves--you say it is heathenish, don't you, Mary?--when I am
where they can't find me, then, it is horrid to think that people
up here will have a hold on me and a right over me still, because
of debts I shall never be able to pay them."

"Don't be too sure of that, Tom," said Mary, cheerfully. "I think
you will pay them yet.--But I have heard it said," she went on,
"that a man in debt never tells the truth about his debts--as if
he had only the face to make them, not to talk about them: can
you make a clean breast of it, Tom?"

"I don't exactly know what they are; but I always did mean to pay
them, and I have some idea about them. I don't think they would
come to more than a hundred pounds."

"Your mother would not hesitate to pay that for you?" said Mary.

"I know she wouldn't; but, then, I'm thinking of Letty."

He paused, and Mary waited.

"You know, when I am gone," he resumed, "there will be nothing
for her but to go to my mother; and it breaks my heart to think
of it. Every sin of mine she will lay to her charge; and how am I
to lie still in my grave--oh, I beg your pardon, Mary."

"I will pay your debts, Tom, and gladly," said Mary, "if they
don't come to much more than you say--than you think, I mean."

"But, don't you see, Mary, that would be only a shifting of my
debt from them to you? Except for Letty, it would not make the
thing any better."

"What!" said Mary, "is there no difference between owing a thing
to one who loves you and one who does not? to one who would
always be wishing you had paid him and one who is glad to have
even the poor bond of a debt between you and her? All of us who
are sorry for our sins are brothers and sisters."

"O Mary!" said Tom.

"But I will tell you what will be better: let your mother pay
your debts, and I will look after Letty. I will care for her like
my own sister, Tom."

"Then I shall die happy," said Tom; and from that day began to
recover.

Many who would pay money to keep a man alive or to deliver him
from pain would pay nothing to take a killing load off the
shoulders of his mind. Hunger they can pity--not mental misery.

Tom would not hear of his mother being written to.

"I have done Letty wrong enough already," he said, "without
subjecting her to the cruel tongue of my mother. I have
conscience enough left not to have anybody else abuse her."

"But, Tom," expostulated Mary, "if you want to be good, one of
your first duties is to be reconciled to your mother."

"I am very sorry things are all wrong between us, Mary," said
Tom. "But, if you want her to come here, you don't know what you
are talking about. She must have everything her own way, or storm
from morning to night. I would gladly make it up with her, but
live with her, or die with her, I could _not_. To make
either possible, you must convert her, too. When you have done
that, I will invite her at once."

"Never mind me, Tom," said Letty. "So long as you love me, I
don't care what even your mother thinks of me. I will do
everything I can to make her comfortable, and satisfied with me."

"Wait till I am better, anyhow, Letty; for I solemnly assure you
I haven't a chance if my mother comes. I will tell you what,
Mary: I promise you, if I get better, I will do what is possible
to be a son to my mother; and for the present I will dictate a
letter, if you will write it, bidding her good-by, and asking her
pardon for everything I have done wrong by her, which you will
please send if I should die. I can not and I will not promise
more."

He was excited and exhausted, and Mary dared not say another
word. Nor truly did she at the moment see what more could be
said. Where all relation has been perverted, things can not be
set right by force. Perhaps all we can do sometimes is to be
willing and wait.

The letter was dictated and written--a lovely one, Mary thought--
and it made her weep as she wrote it. Tom signed it with his own
hand. Mary folded, sealed, addressed it, and laid it away in her
desk.

The same evening Tom said to Letty, putting his thin, long hand
in hers--

"Mary thinks we shall know each other there, Letty."

"Tom!" interrupted Letty, "don't talk like that; I _can't_
bear it. If you do, I shall die before you."

"All I wanted to say," persisted Tom, "was, that I should sit all
day looking out for you, Letty."




CHAPTER XLII.

THE LEPER.


The faint, sweet, luminous jar of bow and string, as betwixt them
they tore the silky air into a dying sound, came hovering--
neither could have said whether it was in the soul only, or there
and in the outer world too.

"What _is_ that?" said Tom.

"Mary!" Letty called into the other room, "there is our friend
with the violin again! Don't you think Tom would like to hear
him?"

"Yes, I do," answered Mary.

"Then would you mind asking him to come and play a little to us?
It would do Tom good, I do think." Mary went up the one stair--
all that now divided them, and found the musician with his
sister--his half-sister she was.

"I thought we should have you in upon us!" said Ann. "Joe thinks
he can play so as nobody can hear him; and I was fool enough to
let him try. I am sorry."

"I am glad," rejoined Mary, "and am come to ask him down stairs;
for Mrs. Helmer and I think it will do her husband good to hear
him. He is very fond of music."

"Much help music will be to him, poor young man!" said Ann,
scornfully.

"Wouldn't you give a sick man a flower, even if it only made him
a little happier for a moment with its scent and its loveliness?"
asked Mary.

"No, I wouldn't. It would only be to help the deceitful heart to
be more desperately wicked."

I will not continue the conversation, although they did a little
longer. Ann's father had been a preacher among the followers of
Whitefield, and Ann was a follower of her father. She laid hold
upon the garment of a hard master, a tyrannical God. Happy he who
has learned the gospel according to Jesus, as reported by John--
that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all! Happy he who
finds God his refuge from all the lies that are told for him, and
in his name! But it is love that saves, and not opinion that
damns; and let the Master himself deal with the weeds in his
garden as with the tares in his field.

"I read my Bible a good deal," said Mary, at last, "but I never
found one of those things you say in it."

"That's because you were never taught to look for them," said
Ann.

"Very likely," returned Mary. "In the mean time I prefer the
violin--that is, with one like your brother to play it."

She turned to the door, and Joseph Jasper, who had not spoken a
word, rose and followed her. As soon as they were outside, Mary
turned to him, and begged he would play the same piece with which
he had ended on the former occasion.

"I thought you did not care for it! I am so glad!" he said.

"I care for it very much," replied Mary, "and have often thought
of it since. But you left in such haste! before I could find
words to thank you!"

"You mean the ten lepers, don't you?" he said. "But of course you
do. I always end off with them."

"Is that how you call it?" returned Mary. "Then you have given me
the key to it, and I shall understand it much better this time, I
hope."

"That is what I call it," said Joseph, "--to myself, I mean, not
to Ann. She would count it blasphemy. God has made so many things
that she thinks must not be mentioned in his hearing!"

When they entered the room, Joseph, casting a quick look round
it, made at once for the darkest corner. Three swift strides took
him there; and, without more preamble than if he had come upon a
public platform to play, he closed his eyes and began.

And now at last Mary understood at least this specimen of his
strange music, and was able to fill up the blanks in the
impression it formerly made upon her. Alas, that my helpless
ignorance should continue to make it impossible for me to
describe it!

A movement even and rather slow, full of unexpected chords,
wonderful to Mary, who did not know that such things could be
made on the violin, brought before her mind's eye the man who
knew all about everything, and loved a child more than a sage,
walking in the hot day upon the border be-tween Galilee and
Samaria. Sounds arose which she interpreted as the stir of
village life, the crying and calling of domestic animals, and of
busy housewives at their duties, carried on half out of doors, in
the homeliness of country custom. Presently the instrument began
to tell the gathering of a crowd, with bee-like hum, and the
crossing of voice with voice--but, at a distance, the sounds
confused and obscure. Swiftly then they seemed to rush together,
to blend and lose themselves in the unity of an imploring melody,
in which she heard the words, uttered afar, with uplifted hands
and voices, drawing nearer and nearer as often repeated, "Jesus,
Master, have mercy on us." Then came a brief pause, and then
what, to her now fully roused imagination, seemed the voice of
the Master, saying, "Go show yourselves unto the priests." Then
followed the slow, half-unwilling, not hopeful march of timeless
feet; then a clang as of something broken, then a silence as of
sunrise, then air and liberty--long-drawn notes divided with
quick, hurried ones; then the trampling of many feet, going
farther and farther--merrily, with dance and song; once more a
sudden pause--and a melody in which she read the awe-struck
joyous return of one. Steadily yet eagerly the feet drew nigh,
the melody growing at once in awe and jubilation, as the man came
nearer and nearer to him whose word had made him clean, until at
last she saw him fall on his face before him, and heard his soul
rushing forth in a strain of adoring thanks, which seemed to end
only because it was choked in tears.

The violin ceased, but, as if its soul had passed from the
instrument into his, the musician himself took up the strain, and
in a mellow tenor voice, with a mingling of air and recitative,
and an expression which to Mary was entrancing, sang the words,
"And he was a Samaritan."

At the sound of his own voice, he seemed to wake up, hung his
head for a moment, as if ashamed of having shown his emotion,
tucked his instrument under his arm, and walked from the room,
without a word spoken on either side. Nor, while he played, had
Mary once seen the face of the man; her soul sat only in the
porch of her ears, and not once looked from the windows of her
eyes.




CHAPTER XLIII.

MARY AND MR. REDMAIN.


A few rudiments of righteousness lurked, in their original
undevelopment, but still in a measure active, in the being of Mr.
Redmain: there had been in the soul of his mother, I suspect, a
strain of generosity, and she had left a mark of it upon him, and
it was the best thing about him. But in action these rudiments
took an evil shape.

Preferring inferior company, and full of that suspicion which
puts the last edge upon what the world calls knowledge of human
nature, he thought no man his equal in penetrating the arena of
motive, and reading actions in the light of motive; and, that the
fundamental principle of all motive was self-interest, he assumed
to be beyond dispute. With this candle, not that of the Lord, he
searched the dark places of the soul; but, where the soul was
light, his candle could show him nothing--served only to blind
him yet further, if possible, to what was there present. And,
because he did not seek the good, never yet in all his life had
he come near enough to a righteous man to recognize that in
something or other that man was different from himself. As for
women--there was his wife--of whom he was willing to think as
well as she would let him! And she, firmly did he believe, was an
angel beside Sepia!--of whom, bad as she was, it is quite
possible he thought yet worse than she deserved: alas for the
woman who is not good, and falls under the judgment of a bad
man!--the good woman he can no more hurt than the serpent can
bite the adamant. He believed he knew Sepia's self, although he
did not yet know her history; and he scorned her the more that he
was not a hair better himself. He had regard enough for his wife,
and what virtue his penetration conceded her, to hate their
intimacy; and ever since his marriage had been scheming how to
get rid of Sepia--only, however, through finding her out: he must
unmask her: there would be no satisfaction in getting rid of her
without his wife's convinced acquiescence. He had been,
therefore, almost all the time more or less on the watch to
uncover the wickedness he felt sure lay at no great depth beneath
her surface; and in the mean time, and for the sake of this end,
he lived on terms of decent domiciliation with her. She had no
suspicion how thin was the crust between her and the lava.

In Cornwall, he began at length to puzzle himself about Mary. Of
course she was just like the rest! but he did not at once succeed
in fitting what he saw to what he entirely believed of her. She
remained, like Sepia, a riddle to be solved. He was not so
ignorant as his wife concerning the relations of the different
classes, and he felt certain there must be some reason, of course
a discreditable one, for her leaving her former, and taking her
present, position. The attack he had in Cornwall afforded him
unexpected opportunity of making her out, as he called it.

Upon this occasion it was also that Mary first ventured to
expostulate with her mistress on her neglect of her husband. She
heard her patiently; and the same day, going to his room, paid
him some small attention--handed him his medicine, I believe, but
clumsily, because ungraciously. The next moment, one of his fits
of pain coming on, he broke into such a torrent of cursing as
swept her in stately dignity from the room. She would not go near
him again.

"Brought up as you have been, Mary," she said, "you can not enter
into the feelings of one in my position, to whom the very tone
even of coarse language is unspeakably odious. It makes me sick
with disgust. Coarseness is what no lady can endure. I beg you
will not mention Mr. Redmain to me again."

"Dear Mrs. Redmain," said Mary, "ugly as such language is, there
are many things worse. It seems to me worse that a wife should
not go near her husband when he is suffering than that he should
in his pain speak bad words."

She had been on the point of saying that a thin skin was not
purity, but bethought herself in time.

"You are scarcely in a position to lay down the law for me,
Mary," said Hesper. "We will, if you please, drop the subject."

Mary's words were overheard, as was a good deal in the house more
than was reckoned on, and reached Mr. Redmain, whom they
perplexed: what could the young woman hope from taking his part?

One morning, after the arrival of Mewks, his man, Mary heard Mr.
Redmain calling him in a tone which betrayed that he had been
calling for some time: the house was an old one, and the bells
were neither in good trim, nor was his in a convenient position.
She thought first to find Mewks, but pity rose in her heart. She
ran to Mr. Redmain's door, which stood half open, and showed
herself.

"Can _I_ not do something for you, sir?" she said.

"Yes, you can. Go and tell that lumbering idiot to come to me
instantly. No! here, you!--there's a good girl!--Oh, damn!--Just
give me your hand, and help me to turn an inch or two."

Change of posture relieved him a little. "Thank you," he said.
"That is better. Wait a few moments, will you--till the rascal
comes?"

Mary stood back, a little behind him, thinking not to annoy him
with the sight of her.

"What are you doing there?" he cried. "I like to see what people
are about in my room. Come in front here, and let me look at
you."

Mary obeyed, and with a smile took the position he pointed out to
her. Immediately followed another agony of pain, in which he
looked beset with demons, whom he not feared but hated. Mary
hurried to him, and, in the compassion which she inherited long
back of Eve, took his hand, the fingers of which were twisting
themselves into shapes like tree-roots. With a hoarse roar, he
dashed hers from him, as if it had been a serpent. She returned
to her place, and stood.

"What did you mean by that?" he said, when he came to himself.
"Do you want to make a fool of me?"

Mary did not understand him, and made no reply. Another fit came.
This time she kept her distance.

"Come here," he howled; "take my head in your hands."

She obeyed.

"Damned nice hands you've got!" he gasped; "much nicer than your
mistress's."

Mary took no notice. Gently she withdrew her hands, for the fit
was over.

"I see! that's the way of you!" he said, as she stepped back.
"But come now, tell me how it is that a nice, well-behaved,
handsome girl like you, should leave a position where, they tell
me, you were your own mistress, and take a cursed place as lady's
maid to my wife."

"It was because I liked Mrs. Redmain so much," answered Mary.
"But, indeed, I was not very comfortable where I was."

"What the devil did you see to like in her? I never saw
anything!"

"She is so beautiful!" said Mary.

"Is she! ho! ho!" he laughed. "What is that to another woman! You
are new to the trade, my girl, if you think that will go down!
One woman taking to another because 'she's so beautiful'! Ha! ha!
ha!"

He repeated Mary's words with an indescribable contempt, and his
laugh was insulting to a degree; but it went off in a cry of
suffering.

"Hypocrisy mustn't be too barefaced," he resumed, when again his
torture abated. "I didn't make you stop to amuse me! It's little
of that this beastly world has got for me! Come, a better reason
for waiting on my wife?"

"That she was kind to me," said Mary, "may be a better reason,
but it is not a truer."

"It's more than ever she was to me! What wages does she give
you?"

"We have not spoken about that yet, sir."

"You haven't had any?"

"I haven't wanted any yet."

"Then what the deuce ever made you come to this house?"

"I hoped to be of some service to Mrs. Redmain," said Mary,
growing troubled.

"And you ain't of any? Is that why you don't want wages?"

"No, sir. That is not the reason."

"Then what _is_ the reason? Come! Trust me. I will be much
better to you than your mistress. Out with it! I knew there was
something!"

"I would rather not talk more about it," said Mary, knowing that
her feeling in relation to Hesper would be altogether incredible,
and the notion of it ridiculous to him.

"You needn't mind telling _me_! I know all about such
things.--Look here! Give me that pocket-book on the table."

Mary brought him the pocket-book. He opened it, and, taking from
it some notes, held them out to her.

"If your mistress won't pay you your wages, I will. There! take
that. You're quite welcome. What matter which pays you? It all
comes out of the same stocking-foot."

"I don't know yet," answered Mary, "whether I shall accept wages
from Mrs. Redmain. Something might happen to make it impossible;
or, if I had taken money, to make me regret it."

"I like that! There you keep a hold on her!" said Mr. Redmain, in
a confidential tone, while in his heart he was more puzzled than
ever. "There's no occasion, though, for all that," he went on,
"to go without your money when you can have it and she be nothing
the wiser. There--take it. I will swear you any oath you like not
to tell my stingy wife."

"She is not stingy," said Mary; "and, if I don't take wages from
her, I certainly shall not from any one else.--Besides," she
added, "it would be dishonest."

"Oh! that's the dodge!" said Mr. Redmain to himself; but aloud,
"Where would be the dishonesty, when the money is mine to do with
as I please?"

"Where the dishonesty, sir!" exclaimed Mary, astounded. "To take
wages from you, and pretend to Mrs. Redmain I was going without!"

"Ha! ha! The first time, no doubt, you ever pretended anything!"

"It would be," said Mary, "so far as I can, at the moment,
remember."

"Go along," cried Mr. Redmain, losing, or pretending to lose,
patience with her; "you are too unscrupulous a liar for me to
deal with."

Mary turned and left the room. As she went, his keen glance
caught the expression of her countenance, and noted the indignant
red that flushed her cheeks, and the lightning of wronged
innocence in her eyes.

"I ought not to have said it," he remarked to himself.

He did not for a moment fancy she had spoken the truth; but the
look of her went to a deeper place in him than he knew even the
existence of.

"Hey! stop," he cried, as she was disappearing. "Come back, will
you?"

"I will find Mr. Mewks," she answered, and went.

After this, Mary naturally dreaded conference with Mr. Redmain;
and he, thinking she must have time to get over the offense he
had given her, made for the present no fresh attempt to come, by
her own aid, at a bird's-eye view of her character and scheme of
life. His curiosity, however, being in no degree assuaged
concerning the odd human animal whose spoor he had for the moment
failed to track, he meditated how best to renew the attempt in
London. Not small, therefore, was his annoyance to find, a few
days after his arrival, that she was no longer in the house. He
questioned his wife as to the cause of her absence, and told her
she was utterly heartless in refusing her leave to go and nurse
her friend; whereupon Hesper, neither from desire to do right nor
from regard to her husband's opinion, but because she either saw
or fancied she saw that, now Mary did not dress her, she no
longer caused the same sensation on entering a room, resolved to
write to her--as if taking it for granted she had meant to return
as soon as she was able. And to prick the sides of this intent
came another spur, as will be seen from the letter she wrote:

"Dear Mary, can you tell me what is become of my large sapphire
ring? I have never seen it since you brought my case up with you
from Cornwall. I have been looking for it all the morning, but in
vain. You _must_ have it. I shall be lost without it, for
you know it has not its equal for color and brilliance. I do not
believe you intended for a moment to keep it, but only to punish
me for thinking I could do without you. If so, you have your
revenge, for I find I can not do without either of you--you or
the ring--so you will not carry the joke further than I can bear.
If you can not come at once, write and tell me it is safe, and I
shall love you more than ever. I am dying to see you again. Yours
faithfully, H. R."

By this time, Letty was much better, and Tom no longer required
such continuous attention; Mary, therefore, betook herself at
once to Mr. Redmain's. Hesper was out shopping, and Mary went to
her own room to wait for her, where she was glad of the
opportunity of getting at some of the things she had left behind
her.

"While she was looking for what she wanted, Sepia entered, and
was, or pretended to be, astonished to see her. In a strange,
sarcastic tone:

"Ah, you there!" she said. "I hope you will find it."

"If you mean the ring, that is not likely, Miss Yolland," Mary
answered.

Sepia was silent a moment or two, then said:

"How is your cousin?"

"I have no cousin," replied Mary.

"The person, I mean, you have been staying with?"

"Better, thank you."

"Almost a pity, is it not--if there should come trouble about
this ring?"

"I do not understand you. The ring will, of course, be found,"
returned Mary.

"In any case the blame will come on you: it was in your charge."

"The ring was in the case when I left."

"You will have to prove that."

"I remember quite well."

"That no one will question."

Beginning at last to understand her insinuations, Mary was so
angry that she dared not speak.

"But it will hardly go to clear you," Sepia went on. "Don't
imagine I mean you have taken it; I am only warning you how the
matter will look, that you may be prepared. Mr. Redmain is one to
believe the worst things of the best people."

"I am obliged to you," said Mary, "but I am not anxious."

"It is necessary you should know also," continued Sepia, "that
there is some suspicion attaching to a female friend of yours as
well, a young woman who used to visit you--the wife of the other,
it is supposed. She was here, I remember, one night there was a
party; I saw you together in my cousin's bedroom. She had just
dressed and gone down."

"I remember," said Mary. "It was Mrs. Helmer."

"Well?"

"It is very unfortunate, certainly; but the truth must be told: a
few days before you left, one of the servants, hearing some one
in the house in the middle of the night, got up and went down,
but only in time to hear the front door open and shut. In the
morning a hat was found in the drawing-room, with the name
_Thomas Helmer_ in it: that is the name of your friend's
husband, I believe?"

"I am aware Mr. Helmer was a frequent visitor," said Mary, trying
to keep cool for what was to come.

This that Sepia told her was true enough, though she was not
accurate as to the time of its occurrence. I will relate briefly
how it came about.

Upon a certain evening, a few days before Mary's return from
Cornwall, Tom would have gone to see Miss Yolland had he not
known that she meant to go to the play with a Mr. Emmet, a cousin
of the Redmains. Before the hour arrived, however, Count Galofta
called, and Sepia went out with him, telling the man who opened
the door to ask Mr. Emmet to wait. The man was rather deaf, and
did not catch with certainty the name she gave. Mr. Emmet did not
appear, and it was late before Sepia returned.

Tom, jealous even to hatred, spent the greater part of his
evening in a tavern on the borders of the city--in gloomy
solitude, drinking brandy-and-water, and building castles of the
most foolish type--for castles are as different as the men that
build them. Through all the rooms of them glided the form of
Sepia, his evil genius. He grew more and more excited as he
built, and as he drank. He rose at last, paid his bill, and, a
little suspicious of his equilibrium, stalked into the street.
There, almost unconsciously, he turned and walked westward. It
was getting late; before long the theatres would be emptying: he
might have a peep of Sepia as she came out!--but where was the
good when that fellow was with her! "But," thought Tom, growing
more and more daring as in an adventurous dream, "why should I
not go to the house, and see her after he has left her at the
door?"

He went to the house and rang the bell. The man came, and said
immediately that Miss Yolland was out, but had desired him to ask
Mr. Helmer to wait; whereupon Tom walked in, and up the stair to
the drawing-room, thence into a second and a third drawing-room,
and from the last into the conservatory. The man went down and
finished his second, pint of ale. From the conservatory, Tom,
finding himself in danger of havoc among the flower-pots, turned
back into the third room, threw himself on a couch, and fell fast
asleep.

He woke in the middle of the night in pitch darkness; and it was
some time before he could remember where he was. When he did, he
recognized that he was in an awkward predicament. But he knew the
house well, and would make the attempt to get out undiscovered.
It was foolish, but Tom was foolish. Feeling his way, he knocked
down a small table with a great crash of china, and, losing his
equanimity, rushed for the stair. Happily the hall lamp was still
alight, and he found no trouble with bolts or lock: the door was
not any way secured.

The first breath of the cold night-air brought with it such a
gush of joy as he had rarely experienced; and he trod the silent
streets with something of the pleasure of an escaped criminal,
until, alas! the wind, at the first turning, let him know that he
had left his hat behind him! He felt as if he had committed a
murder, and left his card-case with the body. A vague terror grew
upon him as he hurried along. Justice seemed following on his
track. He had found the door on the latch: if anything was
missing, how should he explain the presence of his hat without
his own? The devil of the brandy he had drunk was gone out of
him, and only the gray ashes of its evil fire were left in his
sick brain, but it had helped first to kindle another fire, which
was now beginning to glow unsuspected--that of a fever whose fuel
had been slowly gathering for some time.

He opened the door with his pass-key, and hurried up the stair,
his long legs taking three steps at a time. Never before had he
felt as if he were fleeing to a refuge when going home to his
wife.

He opened the door of the sitting-room--and there on the floor
lay Letty and little Tom, as I have already told.

"Why have I heard nothing of this before?" said Mary.

"I am not aware of any right you have to know what happens in
this house."

"Not from you, of course, Miss Yolland--perhaps not from Mrs.
Redmain; but the servants talk of most things, and I have not
heard a word--"

"How could you," interrupted Sepia, "when you were not in the
house?--And, so long as nothing was missed, the thing was of no
consequence," she added. "Now it is different."

This confused Mary a little. She stopped to consider. One thing
was clear--that, if the ring was not lost till after she left--
and of so much she was sure--it could not be Tom that had taken
it, for he was then ill in bed. Something to this effect she
managed to say.

"I told you already," returned Sepia, "that I had no suspicion of
him--at least, I desire to have none, but you may be required to
prove all you say; and it is as well to let you understand--
though there is no reason why _I_ should take the trouble--
that your going to those very people at the time, and their
proving to be friends of yours, adds to the difficulty."

"How?" asked Mary.

"I am not on the jury," replied Sepia, with indifference.

The scope of her remarks seemed to Mary intended to show that any
suspicion of her would only be natural. For the moment the idea
amused her. But Sepia's way of talking about Tom, whatever she
meant by it, was disgraceful!

"I am astonished you should seem so indifferent," she said, "if
the character of a gentleman with whom you have been so intimate
is so seriously threatened as you would imply. I know he has been
to see you more than once while Mr. and Mrs. Redmain were not yet
returned."

Sepia's countenance changed; an evil fire glowed in her eyes, and
she looked at Mary as if she would search her to the bone. The
poorer the character, the more precious the repute!

"The foolish fellow," she returned, with a smile of contempt,
"chose to fall in love with me!--A married man, too!"

"If you understood that, how did he come to be here so often?"
asked Mary, looking her in the face.

But Sepia knew better than declare war a moment before it was
unavoidable.

"Have I not just told you," she said, in a haughty tone, "that
the man was in love with me?"

"And have you not just told me he was a married man? Could he
have come to the house so often without at least your
permission?"

Mary was actually taking the upper hand with her! Sepia felt it
with scarcely repressive rage.

"He deserved the punishment," she replied, with calmness.

"You do not seem to have thought of his wife!"

"Certainly not. She never gave me offense."

"Is offense the only ground for casting a regard on a fellow-
creature?"

"Why should I think of her?"

"Because she was your neighbor, and you were doing her a wrong."

"Once for all, Marston," cried Sepia, overcome at last, "this
kind of thing will not do with me. I may not be a saint, but I
have honesty enough to know the genuine thing from humbug. You
have thrown dust in a good many eyes in this house, but
_none_ in mine."

By this time Mary had got her temper quite in hand, taking a
lesson from the serpent, who will often keep his when the dove
loses hers. She hardly knew what fear was, for she had in her
something a little stronger than what generally goes by the name
of faith. She was therefore able to see that she ought, if
possible, to learn Sepia's object in talking thus to her.

"Why do you say all this to me?" she asked, quietly. "I can not
flatter myself it is from friendship."

"Certainly not. But the motive may be worthy, for all that. You
are not the only one involved. People who would pass for better
than their neighbors will never believe any good purpose in one
who does not choose to talk their slang."

Sepia had repressed her rage, and through it looked aggrieved.
"She confesses to a purpose," said Mary to herself, and waited.

"They are not all villains who are not saints," Sepia went on. "-
-This man's wife is your friend?"

"She is."

"Well, the man himself is my friend--in a sort of a sense." A
strange shiver went through Mary, and seemed to make her angry.
Sepia went on:

"I confess I allowed the poor boy--he is little more--to talk
foolishly to me. I was amused at first, but perhaps I have not
quite escaped unhurt; and, as a woman, you must understand that,
when a woman has once felt in that way, if but for a moment, she
would at least be--sorry--" Here her voice faltered, and she did
not finish the sentence, but began afresh: "What I want of you
is, through his wife, or any way you think best, to let the poor
fellow know he had better slip away--to France, say--and stop
there till the thing blow over."

"But why should you imagine he has had anything to do with the
matter? The ring will be found, and then the hat will not
signify."

"Well," replied Sepia, putting on an air of openness, and for
that sake an air of familiarity, "I see I must tell you the whole
truth. I never did for a moment believe Mr. Helmer had anything
to do with the business, though, when you put me out of temper, I
pretended to believe it, and that you were in it as well: that
was mere irritation. But there is sure to be trouble; for my
cousin is miserable about her sapphire, which she values more
than anything she has; and, if it is not found, the affair will
be put into the hands of the police, and then what will become of
poor Mr. Helmer, be he as innocent as you and I believe him! Even
if the judge should declare that he leaves the court without a
blot on his character, Newgate mud is sure to stick, and he will
be half looked upon as a thief for the rest of his days: the
world is so unjust. Nor is that all; for they will put you in the
witness-box, and make you confess the man an old friend of yours
from the same part of the country; whereupon the counsel for the
prosecution will not fail to hint that you ought to be standing
beside the accused. Believe me, Mary, that, if Mr. Helmer is
taken up for this, you will not come out of it clean."

"Still you explain nothing," said Mary. "You would not have me
believe it is for my sake you are giving yourself all this
trouble?"

"No. But I thought you would see where I was leading you. For--
and now for the _whole_ truth--although nothing can touch
the character of one in my position, it would be worse than
awkward for me to be spoken of in connection with the poor
fellow's visits to the house: _my_ honesty would not be
called in question as yours would, but what is dear to me as my
honesty might--nay, it certainly would. You see now why I came to
you!--You must go to his wife, or, better still, to Mr. Helmer
himself, and tell him what I have been saying to you. He will at
once see the necessity of disappearing for a while."

Mary had listened attentively. She could not help fearing that
something worse than unpleasant might be at hand; but she did not
believe in Sepia, and in no case could consent that Tom should
compromise himself. Danger of this kind must be met, not avoided.
Still, whatever could be done ought to be done to protect him,
especially in his present critical state. A breath of such a
suspicion as this reaching him might be the death of him, and of
Letty, too.

"I will think over what you have said," she answered; "but I can
not give him the advice you wish me. What I shall do I can not
say--the thing has come upon me with such a shock."

"You have no choice that I see," said Sepia. "It is either what I
propose or ruin. I give you fair warning that I will stick at
nothing where my reputation is concerned. You and yours shall be
trod in the dirt before I allow a spot on my character!"

To Mary's relief they were here interrupted by the hurried
entrance of Mrs. Redmain. She almost ran up to her, and took her
by both hands.

"You dear creature! You have brought me my ring!" she cried.

Mary shook her head with a little sigh.

"But you have come to tell me where it is?"

"Alas! no, dear Mrs. Redmain!" said Mary.

"Then you must find it," she said, and turned away with an
ominous-looking frown. "I will do all I can to help you find it."

"Oh, you _must_ find it! My jewel-case was in your charge."

"But there has been time to lose everything in it, the one after
the other, since I gave it up. The sapphire ring was there, I
know, when I went."

"That can not be. You gave me the box, and I put it away myself,
and, the next time I looked in it, it was not there."

"I wish I had asked you to open it when I gave it you," said
Mary.

"I wish you had," said Hesper. "But the ring must be found, or I
shall send for the police."

"I will not make matters worse, Mrs. Redmain," said Mary, with as
much calmness as she could assume, and much was needed, "by
pointing out what your words imply. If you really mean what you
say, it is I who must insist on the police being sent for."

"I am sure, Mary," said Sepia, speaking for the first time since
Hesper's entrance, "that your mistress has no intention of
accusing you."

"Of course not," said Hesper; "only, what am I to do? I must have
my ring. Why did you come, if you had nothing to tell me about
it?"

"How could I stay away when you were in trouble? Have you
searched everywhere?"

"Everywhere I can think of."

"Would you like me to help you look? I feel certain it will be
found."

"No, thank you. I am sick of looking."

"Shall I go, then?--What would you like me to do?"

"Go to your room, and wait till I send for you."

"I must not be long away from my invalids," said Mary, as
cheerfully as she could.

"Oh, indeed! I thought you had come back to your work!"

"I did not understand from your letter you wished that, ma'am--
though, indeed, I could not have come just yet in any case."

"Then you mean to go, and leave things just as they are?"

"I am afraid there is no help for it. If I could do anything-.
But I will call again to-morrow, and every day till the ring is
found, if you like."

"Thank you," said Hesper, dryly; "I don't think that would be of
much use."

"I will call anyhow," returned Mary, "and inquire whether you
would like to see me.--I will go to my room now, and while I wait
will get some things I want."

"As you please," said Hesper.

Scarcely was Mary in her room, however, when she heard the door,
which had the trick of falling-to of itself, closed and locked,
and knew that she was a prisoner. For one moment a frenzy of
anger overcame her; the next, she remembered where her life was
hid, knew that nothing could touch her, and was calm. While she
took from her drawers the things she wanted, and put them in her
hand-bag, she heard the door unlocked, but, as no one entered,
she sat down to wait what would next arrive.

Mrs. Redmain, as soon as she was aware of her loss, had gone in
her distress to tell her husband, whose gift the ring had been.
Unlike his usual self, he had showed interest in the affair. She
attributed this to the value of the jewel, and the fact that he
had himself chosen it: he was rather, and thought himself very,
knowing in stones; and the sapphire was in truth a most rare one:
but it was for quite other reasons that Mr. Redmain cared about
its loss: it would, he hoped, like the famous carbuncle, cast a
light all round it.

He was as yet by no means well, and had not been from the house
since his return.

The moment Mary was out of the room, Hesper rose.

"I should be a fool to let her leave the house," she said.

"Hesper, you will do nothing but mischief," cried Sepia.

Hesper paid no attention, but, going after Mary, locked the door
of her room, and, running to her husband's, told him she had made
her a prisoner.

No sooner was she in her husband's room than Sepia hastened to
unlock Mary's door; but, just as she did so, she heard some one
on the stair above, and retreated without going in. She would
then have turned the key again, but now she heard steps on the
stair below, and once more withdrew.

Mary heard a knock at her door. Mewks entered. He brought a
request from his master that she would go to his room.

She rose and went, taking her bag with her.

"You may go now, Mrs. Redmain," said her husband when Mary
entered. "Get out, Mewks," he added; and both lady and valet
disappeared.

"So!" he said, with a grin of pleasure. "Here's a pretty
business! You may sit down, though. You haven't got the ring in
that bag there?"

"Nor anywhere else, sir," answered Mary. "Shall I shake it out on
the floor?--or on the sofa would be better."

"Nonsense! You don't imagine me such a fool as to suppose, if you
had it, you would carry it about in your bag!"

"You don't believe I have it, sir--do you?" she returned, in a
tone of appeal.

"How am I to know what to believe? There is something dubious
about you--you have yourself all but admitted that: how am I to
know that robbery mayn't be your little dodge? All that rubbish
you talked down at Lychford about honesty, and taking no wages,
and loving your mistress, and all that rot, looks devilish like
something off the square! That ring, now, the stone of it alone,
is worth seven hundred pounds: one might let pretty good wages go
for a chance like that!"

Mary looked him in the face, and made him no answer. He spied a
danger: if he irritated her, he would get nothing out of her!

"My girl," he said, changing his tone, "I believe you know
nothing about the ring; I was only teasing you."

Mary could not help a sigh of relief, and her eyes fell, for she
felt them beginning to fill. She could not have believed that the
judgment of such a man would ever be of consequence to her. But
the unity of the race is a thing that can not be broken.

Now, although Mr. Redmain was by no means so sure of her
innocence as he had pretended, he did at least wish and hope to
find her innocent--from no regard for her, but because there was
another he would be more glad to find concerned in the ugly
affair.

"Mrs. Redmain," he went on, "would have me hand you over to the
police; but I won't. You may go home when you please, and you
need fear nothing."

He had the house where the Helmers lodged already watched, and
knew this much, that some one was ill there, and that the doctor
came almost every day.

"I certainly shall fear nothing," said Mary, not quite trusting
him; "my fate is in God's hands."

"We know all about that," said Mr. Redmain; "I'm up to most
dodges. But look here, my girl: it wouldn't be prudent in me,
lest there should be such a personage as you have just mentioned,
to be hard upon any of my fellow-creatures: I am one day pretty
sure to be in misfortune myself. You mightn't think it of me, but
I am not quite a heathen, and do reflect a little at times. You
may be as wicked as myself, or as good as Joseph, for anything I
know or care, for, as I say, it ain't my business to judge you.
Tell me now what you are up to, and I will make it the better for
you."

Mary had been trying hard to get at what he was "up to," but
found herself quite bewildered.

"I am sorry, sir," she faltered, "but I haven't the slightest
idea what you mean."

"Then you go home," he said. "I will send for you when I want
you."

The moment she was out of the room, he rang his bell violently.
Mewks appeared.

"Go after that young woman--do you hear? You know her--Miss--damn
it, what's her name?--Harland or Cranston, or--oh, hang it! you
know well enough, you rascal!"

"Do you mean Miss Marston, sir?"

"Of course I do! Why didn't you say so before? Go after her, I
tell you; and make haste. If she goes straight home--you know
where--come back as soon as she's inside the door."

"Yes, sir."

"Damn you, go, or you'll lose sight of her!"

"I'm a-listenin' after the street-door, sir. It ain't gone yet.
There it is now!"

And with the word he left the room.

Mary was too much absorbed in her own thoughts to note that she
was followed by a man with the collar of his great-coat up to his
eyes, and a woolen comforter round his face. She walked on
steadily for home, scarce seeing the people that passed her. It
was clear to Mewks that she had not a suspicion of being kept in
sight. He saw her in at her own door, and went back to his
master.




CHAPTER XLIV.

JOSEPH JASPER.


Another fact Mewks carried to his master--namely, that, as Mary
came near the door of the house, she was met by "a rough-looking
man," who came walking slowly along, as if he had been going up
and down waiting for her. Ho made her an awkward bow as she drew
near, and she stopped and had a long conversation with him--such
at least it seemed to Mewks, annoyed that he could hear nothing
of it, and fearful of attracting their attention--after which the
man went away, and Mary went into the house. This report made his
master grin, for, through the description Mewks gave, he
suspected a thief disguised as a workman; but, his hopes being
against the supposition, he dwelt the less upon it.

The man who stopped Mary, and whom, indeed, she would have
stopped, was Joseph Jasper, the blacksmith. That he was rough in
appearance, no one who knew him would have wished himself able to
deny, and one less like a thief would have been hard to find. His
hands were very rough and ingrained with black; his fingers were
long, but chopped off square at the points, and had no
resemblance to the long, tapering fingers of an artist or
pickpocket. His clothes were of corduroy, not very grimy, because
of the huge apron of thick leather he wore at his work, but they
looked none the better that he had topped them with his tall
Sunday hat. His complexion was a mixture of brown and browner;
his black eyebrows hung far over the blackest of eyes, the
brightest flashing of which was never seen, because all the time
he played he kept them closed tight. His face wore its natural
clothing--a mustache thick and well-shaped, and a beard not too
large, of a color that looked like black burned brown. His hair
was black and curled all over his head. His whole appearance was
that of a workman; a careless glance could never have suspected
him a poet-musician; as little could even such a glance have
failed to see in him an honest man. He was powerfully built, over
the middle height, but not tall. He spoke very fair old-fashioned
English, with the Yorkshire tone and turn. His walk was rather
plodding, and his movements slow and stiff; but in communion with
his violin they were free enough, and the more delicate for the
strength that was in them; at the anvil they were as supple as
powerful. On his face dwelt an expression that was not to be read
by the indifferent--a waiting in the midst of work, as of a man
to whom the sense of the temporary was always present, but
present with the constant reminder that, just therefore, work
must be as good as work can be that things may last their due
time.

The following was the conversation concerning the purport of
which Mewks was left to what conjecture was possible to a
serving-man of his stamp.

Mary held out her hand to Jasper, and it disappeared in his. He
held it for a moment with a great but gentle grasp, and, as he
let it go, said:

"I took the liberty of watching for you, miss. I wanted to ask a
favor of you. It seemed to me you would take no offense."

"You might be sure of that," Mary answered. "You have a right to
anything I can do for you."

He fixed his gaze on her for a moment, as if he did not
understand her. "That's where it is," he said: "I've _done_
nothing for your people. It's all very well to go playing and
playing, but that's not doing anything; and, if _he_ had
done nothing, there would ha' been no fiddling. You understand
me, miss, I know: work comes before music, and makes the soul of
it; it's not the music that makes the doing. I'm a poor hand at
saying without my fiddle, miss: you'll excuse me."

Mary's heart was throbbing. She had not heard a word like this--
not since her father went to what people call the "long home"--as
if a home could be too long! What do we want but an endless
home?--only it is not the grave! She felt as if the spirit of her
father had descended on the strange workman, and had sent him to
her. She looked at him with shining eyes, and did not speak. He
resumed, as fearing he had not conveyed his thought.

"What I think I mean is, miss, that, if the working of miracles
in his name wouldn't do it, it's not likely playing the fiddle
will."

"Oh, I understand you so well!" said Mary, in a voice hardly her
own, "--so well! It makes me happy to hear you! Tell me what I
can do for you."

"The poor gentleman in there must want all the help you can give
him, and more. There must be something left, surely, for a man to
do. He must want lifting at times, for instance, and that's not
fit for either of you ladies."

"Thank you," said Mary, heartily. "I will mention it to Mrs.
Helmer, and I am sure she will be very glad of your help
sometimes."

"Couldn't you ask her now, miss? I should like to know at what
hour I might call. But perhaps the best way would be to walk
about here in the evening, after my day's work is over, and then
you could run down any time, and look out: that would be enough;
I should be there. Saturday nights I could just as well be there
all night."

To Tom and Letty it seemed not a little peculiar that a man so
much a stranger should be ready to walk about the street in order
to be at hand with help for them; but Mary was only delighted,
not surprised, for what the man had said to her made the thing
not merely intelligible, but absolutely reasonable.

Joseph was not, however, allowed to wander the street. The
arrangement made was, that, as soon as his work was over, he
should come and see whether there was anything he could do for
them. And he never came but there was plenty to do. He took a
lodging close by, that he might be with them earlier, and stay
later; and, when nothing else was wanted of him, he was always
ready to discourse on his violin. Sometimes Tom enjoyed his music
much, though he found no little fault with his mode of playing,
for Tom knew something about everything, and could render many a
reason; at other times, he preferred having Mary read to him.

On one of these latter occasions, Mary, occupied in cooking
something for the invalid, asked Joseph to read for her. He
consented, but read very badly--as if he had no understanding of
the words, but, on the other hand, stopping every few lines,
apparently to think and master what he had read. This was not
good reading anyway, least of all for an invalid who required the
soothing of half-thought, molten and diluted in sweet, even,
monotonous sound, and it was long before Mary asked him again.

Many things showed that he had had little education, and
therefore probably the more might be made of him. Mary saw that
he must be what men call a genius, for his external history had
been, by his own showing, of an altogether commonplace type.

His father, who was a blacksmith before him, and a local
preacher, had married a second time, and Joseph was the only
child of the second marriage. His father had brought him up to
his own trade, and, after his death, Joseph came to work in
London, whither his sister had preceded him. He was now thirty,
and had from the first been saving what he could of his wages in
the hope of one day having a smithy of his own, and his time more
at his ordering.

Mary saw too that in his violin he possessed a grand fundamental
undeveloped education; he was like a man going about the world
with a ten-thousand-pound-note in his pocket, and not many
sixpences to pay his way with. But there was another education
working in him far deeper, and already more developed, than that
which divine music even was giving him; this also Mary thoroughly
recognized; this it was in him that chiefly attracted her; and
the man himself knew it as underlying all his consciousness.

Though he could ill read aloud, he could read well for his inward
nourishment; he could write tolerably, and, if he could not
spell, that mattered a straw, and no more; he had never read a
play of Shakespeare--had never seen a play; knew nothing of
grammar or geography--or of history, except the one history
comprising all. He knew nothing of science; but he could shoe a
horse as well as any man in the three Eidings, and make his
violin talk about things far beyond the ken of most men of
science.

So much of a change had passed upon Tom in his illness, that Mary
saw it not unreasonable to try upon him now and then a poem of
her favorite singer. Occasionally, of course, the feeling was
altogether beyond him, but even then he would sometimes enter
into the literary merit of the utterance.

"I had no idea there were such gems in George Herbert, Mary!" he
said once. "I declare, some of them are even in their structure
finer than many things that have nothing in them to admire except
the structure."

"That is not to be wondered at," replied Mary.

"No," said Joseph; "it is not to be wondered at; for it's clear
to me the old gentleman plied a good bow. I can see that plain
enough."

"Tell us how you see it," said Mary, more interested than she
would have liked to show.

"Easily," he answered. "There was one poem"--he pronounced it
_pome_--"you read just now--"

"Which? which?" interrupted Mary, eagerly.

"That I can not tell you; but, all the time you were reading it,
I heard the gentleman--Mr. George Herbert, you call him--playing
the tune to it."

"If you heard him so well," ventured Mary, "you could, I fancy,
play the tune over again to us."

"I think I could," he answered, and, rising, went for his
instrument, which he always brought, and hung on an old nail in
the wall the moment he came in.

He played a few bars of a prelude, as if to get himself into
harmony with the recollection of what he had heard the master
play, and then began a lively melody, in which he seemed as usual
to pour out his soul. Long before he reached the end of it, Mary
had reached the poem.

"This is the one you mean, is it not?" she said, as soon as he
had finished--and read it again.

In his turn he did not speak till she had ended.

"That's it, miss," he said then; "I can't mistake it; for, the
minute you began, there was the old gentleman again with his
fiddle."

"And you know now what it says, don't you?" asked Mary.

"I heard nothing but the old gentleman," answered the musician.

Mary turned to Tom.

"Would you mind if I tried to show Mr. Jasper what I see in the
poem? He can't get a hold of it himself for the master's violin
in his ears; it won't let him think about it."

"I should like myself to hear what you have got to say about it,
Mary! Go on," said Tom.

Mary had now for a long time been a student of George Herbert;
and anything of a similar life-experience goes infinitely
further, to make one understand another, than any amount of
learning or art. Therefore, better than many a poet, Mary was
able to set forth the scope and design of this one. Herself at
the heart of the secret from which came all his utterance, she
could fit herself into most of the convolutions of the shell of
his expression, and was hence able also to make others perceive
in his verse not a little of what they were of themselves unable
to see.

"We shall have you lecturing at the Royal Institution yet, Mary,"
said Tom; "only it will be long before its members care for that
sort of antique."

Tom's insight had always been ahead of his character, and of late
he had been growing. People do grow very fast in bed sometimes.
Also he had in him plenty of material, to which a childlike
desire now began to give shapes and sequences.

The musician's remark consisted in taking his violin, and once
more giving his idea of the "old gentleman's" music, but this
time with a richer expression and fuller harmonies. Mary had
every reason to be satisfied with her experiment. From that time
she talked a good deal more about her favorite writers, and
interested both the critical taste of Tom and the artistic
instinct of the blacksmith.

But Joseph's playing had great faults: how could it be
otherwise?--and to Mary great seemed the pity that genius should
not be made perfect in faculty, that it should not have that
redemption of its body for which unwittingly it groaned. And the
man was one of those childlike natures which may indeed go a long
time without discovering this or that external fault in
themselves, patent to the eye of many an inferior onlooker--for
the simple soul is the last to see its own outside--but, once
they become aware of it, begin that moment to set the thing
right. At the same time he had not enough of knowledge to render
it easy to show him by words wherein any fault consisted--the
nature, the being of the fault, that is--what it simply was; but
Mary felt confident that, the moment he saw a need, he would obey
its law.

She had taken for herself the rooms below, formerly occupied by
the Helmers, with the hope of seeing them before long reinstated
in them; and there she had a piano, the best she could afford to
hire: with its aid she hoped to do something toward the breaking
of the invisible bonds that tied the wings of Jasper's genius.

His great fault lay in his time. Dare I suggest that he contented
himself with measuring it to his inner ear, and let his fingers,
like horses which he knew he had safe in hand, play what pranks
they pleased? A reader may, I think, be measuring verse correctly
to himself, and yet make of it nothing but rugged prose to his
hearers. Perhaps this may be how severe masters of quantity in
the abstract are so careless of it in the concrete--in the
audible, namely, where alone it is of value. Shall I analogize
yet a little further, and suggest the many who admire
righteousness and work iniquity; who say, "Lord, Lord," and
seldom or never obey? Anyhow, a man may have a good enough ear,
with which he holds all the time a secret understanding, and from
carelessness offend grievously the ears he ought to please; and
it was thus with Joseph Jasper.

Mary was too wise to hurry anything. One evening when he came as
usual, and she knew he was not at the moment wanted, she asked
him to take a seat while she played something to him. But she was
not a little disappointed in the reception he gave her offering--
a delicate morsel from Beethoven. She tried something else, but
with no better result. He showed little interest: he was not a
man capable of showing where nothing was, for he never meant to
show anything; his expression was only the ripple of the
unconscious pool to the sway and swirl of the fishes below. It
seemed as if he had only a narrow entrance for the admission of
music into his understanding--but a large outlet for the spring
that rose within him, and was, therefore, a somewhat remarkable
exception to the common run of mortals: in such, the capacity for
reception far exceeds the capability of production. His dominant
thoughts were in musical form, and easily found their expression
in music; but, mainly no doubt from want of practice in
reception, and experience of variety in embodiment, the forms in
which others gave themselves utterance could not with
corresponding readiness find their way to the sympathetic place
in him. But pride or repulsion had no share in this defect. The
man was open and inspired, and stupid as a child.

The next time she made the attempt to open this channel between
them, something she played did find him, and for a few minutes he
seemed lost in listening.

"How nice it would be," she said, "if we could play together
sometimes!"

"Do you mean both at once, miss?" he asked.

"Yes--you on your violin, and I on the piano."

"That could hardly be, I'm afraid, miss," he answered; "for, you
see, I don't know always--not exactly--what I'm going to play;
and if I don't know, and you don't know, how are we to keep
together?"

"Nobody can play your own things but yourself, of course--that
is, until you are able to write them down; but, if you would
learn something, we could play that together."

"I don't know how to learn. I've heard tell of the notes and all
that, but I don't know how to work them."

"You have heard the choir in the church--all keeping with the
organ," said Mary.

"Scarcely since I was a child--and not very often then--though my
mother took me sometimes. But I was always wanting to get out
again, and gave no heed."

"Do you never go to church now?"

"No, miss--not for long. Time's too precious to waste."

"How do you spend it, then?"

"As soon as I've had my breakfast--that's on a Sunday, I mean--I
get up and lock my door, and set myself to have a day of it. Then
I read the next thing where I stopped last--whether it be a
chapter or a verse--till I get the sense of it--if I can't get
that, it's no manner of use to me; and I generally know when I've
got it by finding the bow in one hand and the fiddle in the
other. Then, with the two together, I go stirring and stirring
about at the story, and the music keeps coming and coming; and
when it stops, which it does sometimes all at once, then I go
back to the book."

"But you don't go on like that all day, do you?" said Mary.

"I generally go on till I'm hungry, and then I go out for
something to eat. My landlady won't get me any dinner. Then I
come back and begin again."

"Will you let me teach you to read music?" said Mary, more and
more delighted with him, and desirous of contributing to his
growth--the one great service of the universe.

"If you would, miss, perhaps then I might be able to learn. You
see, I never was like other people. Mother was the only one that
didn't take me for an innocent. She used to talk big things about
me, and the rest used to laugh at her. She gave me her large
Testament when she was dying, but, if it hadn't been for Ann, I
should never have been able to read it well enough to understand
it. And now Ann tells me I'm a heathen and worship my fiddle,
because I don't go to chapel with her; but it do seem such a
waste of good time. I'll go to church, though, miss, if you tell
me it's the right thing to do; only it's hard to work all the
week, and be weary all the Sunday. I should only be longing for
my fiddle all the time. You don't think, miss, that a great
person like God cares whether we pray to him in a room or in a
church?"

"No, I don't," answered Mary. "For my own part, I find I can pray
best at home."

"So can I," said Joseph, with solemn fervor. "Indeed, miss, I
can't pray at all sometimes till I get my fiddle under my chin,
and then it says the prayers for me till I grow able to pray
myself. And sometimes, when I seem to have got to the outside of
prayer, and my soul is hungrier than ever, only I can't tell what
I want, all at once I'm at my fiddle again, and it's praying for
me. And then sometimes it seems as if I lost myself altogether,
and God took me, for I'm nowhere and everywhere all at once."

Mary thought of the "groanings that can not be uttered." Perhaps
that is just what music is meant for--to say the things that have
no shape, therefore can have no words, yet are intensely alive--
the unembodied children of thought, the eternal child. Certainly
the musician can groan the better with the aid of his violin.
Surely this man's instrument was the gift of God to him. All
God's gifts are a giving of himself. The Spirit can better dwell
in a violin than in an ark or in the mightiest of temples.

But there was another side to the thing, and Mary felt bound to
present it.

"But, you know, Mr. Jasper," she said, "when many violins play
together, each taking a part in relation to all the rest, a much
grander music is the result than any single instrument could
produce."

"I've heard tell of such things, miss, but I've never heard
them." He had never been to concert or oratorio, any more than
the play.

"Then you shall hear them," said Mary, her heart filling with
delight at the thought. "--But what if there should be some way
in which the prayers of all souls may blend like many violins? We
are all brothers and sisters, you know--and what if the gathering
together in church be one way of making up a concert of souls?--
Imagine one mighty prayer, made up of all the desires of all the
hearts God ever made, breaking like a huge wave against the foot
of his throne!"

"There would be some force in a wave like that, miss!" said
Joseph. "But answer me one question: Ain't it Christ that teaches
men to pray?"

"Surely," answered Mary. "He taught them with his mouth when he
was on the earth; and now he teaches them with his mind."

"Then, miss, I will tell you why it seems to me that churches
can't be the places to tune the fiddles for that kind of consort
--and that's just why I more than don't care to go into one of
them: I never heard a sermon that didn't seem to be taking my
Christ from me, and burying him where I should never find him any
more. For the somebody the clergy talk about is not only nowise
like my Christ, but nowise like a live man at all. It always
seemed to me more like a guy they had dressed up and called by
his name than the man I read about in my mother's big Testament."

"How my father would have delighted in this man!" said Mary to
herself.

"You see, miss," Jasper resumed, "I can't help knowing something
about these matters, because I was brought up in it all, my
father being a local preacher, and a very good man. Perhaps, if I
had been as clever as Sister Ann, I might be thinking now just as
she does; but it seems to me a man that is born stupid has much
to be thankful for: he can't take in things before his heart's
ready for believing them, and so they don't get spoiled, like a
child's book before he is able to read it. All that I heard when
I went with my father to his preachings was to me no more than
one of the chapters full of names in the Book of Chronicles--
though I do remember once hearing a Wesleyan clergyman say that
he had got great spiritual benefit from those chapters. I wasn't
even frightened at the awful things my father said about hell,
and the certainty of our going there if we didn't lay hold upon
the Saviour; for, all the time, he showed but such a ghost or
cloud of a man that he called the Saviour as it wasn't possible
to lay hold upon. Not that I reasoned about it that way then; I
only felt no interest in the affair; and my conscience said
nothing about it. But after my father and mother were gone, and I
was at work away from all my old friends--well, I needn't trouble
you with what it was that set me a-thinking--it was only a great
disappointment, such as I suppose most young fellows have to go
through--I shouldn't wonder," he added with a smile, "if that was
what you ladies are sent into this world for--to take the conceit
out of the likes of us, and give us something to think about.
What came of it was, that I began to read my mother's big
Testament in earnest, and then my conscience began to speak. Here
was a man that said he was God's son, and sent by him to look
after us, and we must do what he told us or we should never be
able to see our Father in heaven! That's what I made out of it,
miss. And my conscience said to me, that I must do as he said,
seeing he had taken all that trouble, and come down to look after
us. If he spoke the truth, and nobody could listen to him without
being sure of that, there was nothing left but just to do the
thing he said. So I set about getting a hold of anything he did
say, and trying to do it. And then it was that I first began to
be able to play on the fiddle, though I had been muddling away at
it for a long time before. I knew I could play then, because I
understood what it said to me, and got help out of it. I don't
really mean that, you know, miss; for I know well enough that the
fiddle in itself is nothing, and nothing is anything but the way
God takes to teach us. And that's how I came to know you, miss."

"How do you mean that?" asked Mary.

"I used to be that frightened of Sister Ann that, after I came to
London, I wouldn't have gone near her, but that I thought Jesus
Christ would have me go; and, if I hadn't gone to see her, I
should never have seen you. When I went to see her, I took my
fiddle with me to take care of me; and, when she would be going
on at me, I would just give my fiddle a squeeze under my arm, and
that gave me patience."

"But we heard you playing to her, you know."

"That was because I always forgot myself while she was talking.
The first time, I remember, it was from misery--what she was
saying sounded so wicked, making God out not fit for any honest
man to believe in. I began to play without knowing it, and it
couldn't have been very loud, for she went on about the devil
picking up the good seed sown in the heart. Off I went into that,
and there I saw no end of birds with long necks and short legs
gobbling up the corn. But, a little way off, there was the long
beautiful stalks growing strong and high, waving in God's wind;
and the birds did not go near them."

Mary drew a long breath, and said to herself:

"The man is a poet!"--"You're not afraid of your sister now?" she
said to him.

"Not a bit," he answered. "Since I knew you, I feel as if we had
in a sort of a way changed places, and she was a little girl that
must be humored and made the best of. When she scolds, I laugh,
and try to make a bit of fun with her. But she's always so sure
she's right, that you wonder how the world got made before she
was up."

They parted with the understanding that, when he came next, she
should give him his first lesson in reading music. With herself
Mary made merry at the idea of teaching the man of genius his
letters.

But, when once, through trying to play with her one of his own
pieces which she had learned from hearing him play it, he had
discovered how imperative it was to keep good time, he set
himself to the task with a determination that would have made
anything of him that he was only half as fit to become as a
musician.

When, however, in a short time, he was able to learn from notes,
he grew so delighted with some of the music Mary got for him,
entering into every nicety of severest law, and finding therein a
better liberty than that of improvisation, that he ceased for
long to play anything of his own, and Mary became mortally afraid
lest, in developing the performer, she had ruined the composer.

"How can I go playing such loose, skinny things," he would say,
"when here are such perfect shapes all ready to my hand!"

But Mary said to herself that, if these were shapes, his were
odors.




CHAPTER XLV.

THE SAPPHIRE.


One morning, as Mary sat at her piano, Mewks was shown into the
room. He brought the request from his master that she would go to
him; he wanted particularly to see her. She did not much like it,
neither did she hesitate.

She was shown into the room Mr. Redmain called his study, which
communicated by a dressing-room with his bedroom. He was seated,
evidently waiting for her.

"Ah, Miss Marston!" he said; "I have a piece of good news for
you--so good that I thought I should like to give it you myself."

"You are very kind, sir," Mary answered.

"There!" he went on, holding out what she saw at once was the
lost ring.

"I am so glad!" she said, and took it in her hand. "Where was it
found?"

"There's the point!" he returned. "That is just why I sent for
you! Can you suggest any explanation of the fact that it was
found, after all, in a corner of my wife's jewel-box? Who
searched the box last?"

"I do not know, sir."

"Did you search it?"

"No, sir. I offered to help Mrs. Redmain to look for the ring,
but she said it was no use. Who found it, sir?"

"I will tell you who found it, if you will tell me who put it
there."

"I don't know what you mean, sir. It must have been there all the
time."

"That's the point again! Mrs. Redmain swears it was not, and
could not have been, there when she looked for it. It is not like
a small thing, you see. There is something mysterious about it."

He looked hard at Mary.

Now, Mary had very much admired the ring, as any one must who had
an eye for stones; and had often looked at it--into the heart of
it--almost loving it; and while they were talking now, she kept
gazing at it. When Mr. Redmain ended, she stood silent. In her
silence, her attention concentrated itself upon the sapphire. She
stood long, looking closely at it, moving it about a little, and
changing the direction of the light; and, while her gaze was on
the ring, Mr. Redmain's gaze was on her, watching her with equal
attention. At last, with a sigh, as if she waked from a reverie,
she laid the ring on the table. But Mr. Redmain still stared in
her face.

"Now what is it you've got in your head?" he said at last. "I
have been watching you think for three minutes and a half, I do
believe. Come, out with it!"

"Hardly _think_, sir," answered Mary. "I was only plaguing
myself between my recollection of the stone and the actual look
of it. It is so annoying to find what seemed a clear recollection
prove a deceitful one! It may appear a presumptuous thing to say,
but my recollection seems of a finer color."

While she spoke, she had again taken the ring, and was looking at
it. Mr. Redmain snatched it from her hand.

"The devil!" he cried. "You haven't the face to hint that the
stone has been changed?"

Mary laughed.

"Such a thing never came into my head, sir; but now that you have
put it there, I could almost believe it."

"Go along with you!" he cried, casting at her a strange look
which she could not understand, and the same moment pulling the
bell hard.

That done, he began to examine the ring intently, as Mary had
been doing, and did not speak a word. Mewks came.

"Show Miss Marston out," said his master; "and tell my coachman
to bring the hansom round directly."

"For Miss Marston?" inquired Mewks, who had learned not a little
cunning in the service.

"No!" roared Mr. Redmain; and Mewks darted from the room,
followed more leisurely by Mary.

"I don't know what's come to master!" ventured Mewks, as he led
the way down the stair.

But Mary took no notice, and left the house.

For about a week she heard nothing.

In the meantime Mr. Redmain had been prosecuting certain
inquiries he had some time ago begun, and another quite new one
besides. He was acquainted with many people of many different
sorts, and had been to jewelers and pawnbrokers, gamblers and
lodging-house keepers, and had learned some things to his
purpose.

Once more Mary received from him a summons, and once more,
considerably against her liking, obeyed. She was less disinclined
to go this time, however, for she felt not a little curious about
the ring.

"I want you to come back to the house," he said, abruptly, the
moment she entered his room.

For such a request Mary was not prepared. Even since the ring was
found, so long a time had passed that she never expected to hear
from the house again. But Tom was now so much better, and Letty
so much like her former self, that, if Mrs. Redmain had asked
her, she might perhaps have consented.

"Mr. Redmain," she answered, "you must see that I can not do so
at your desire."

"Oh, rubbish! humbug!" he returned, with annoyance. "Don't fancy
I am asking you to go fiddle-faddling about my wife again: I
don't see how you _can_ do that, after the way she has used
you! But I have reasons for wanting to have you within call. Go
to Mrs. Perkin. I won't take a refusal."

"I can not do it, Mr. Redmain," said Mary; "the thing is
impossible." And she turned to leave the room.

"Stop, stop!" cried Mr. Redmain, and jumped from his chair to
prevent her.

He would not have succeeded had not Mewks met her in the doorway
full in the face. She had to draw back to avoid him, and the man,
perceiving at once how things were, closed the door the moment he
entered, and stood with his back against it.

"He's in the drawing-room, sir," said Mewks.

A scarcely perceptible sign of question was made by the master,
and answered in kind by the man.

"Show him here directly," said Mr. Redmain. Then turning to Mary,
"Go out that way, Miss Marston, if you will go," he said, and
pointed to the dressing-room.

Mary, without a suspicion, obeyed; but, just as she discovered
that the door into the bedroom beyond was locked, she heard the
door behind her locked also. She turned, and knocked.

"Stay where you are," said Mr. Redmain, in a low but imperative
voice. "I can not let you out till this gentleman is gone. You
must hear what passes: I want you for a witness."

Bewildered and annoyed, Mary stood motionless in the middle of
the room, and presently heard a man, whose voice seemed not quite
strange to her, greet Mr. Redmain like an old friend. The latter
made a slight apology for having sent for him to his study--
claiming the privilege, he said, of an invalid, who could not for
a time have the pleasure of meeting him either at the club or at
his wife's parties. The visitor answered agreeably, with a touch
of merriment that seemed to indicate a soul at ease with itself
and with the world.

But here Mary all at once came to herself, and was aware that she
was in quite a false position. She withdrew therefore to the
farthest corner, sat down, closed her ears with the palms of her
hands, and waited.

She had sat thus for a long time, not weary, but occupied with
such thoughts as could hardly for a century or two cross the
horizon line of such a soul as Mr. Redmain's, even if he were at
once to repent, when she heard a loud voice calling her name from
a distance. She raised her head, and saw the white, skin-drawn
face of Mr. Redmain grinning at her from the open door. When he
spoke again, his words sounded like thunder, for she had removed
her hands from her ears.

"I fancy you've had a dose of it!" he said.

As he spoke, she rose to her feet, her countenance illumined both
with righteous anger and the tender shine of prayer. Her look
went to what he had of a heart, and the slightest possible color
rose to his face.

"Gone a step too far, damn it!" he murmured to himself. "There's
no knowing one woman by another!"

"I see!" he said; "it's been a trifle too much for you, and I
don't wonder! You needn't believe a word I said about myself. It
was all hum to make the villain show his game."

"I have not heard a word, Mr. Redmain," she said with
indignation.

"Oh, you needn't trouble yourself!" he returned. "I meant you to
hear it all. What did I put you there for, but to get your oath
to what I drew from the fellow? A fine thing if your pretended
squeamishness ruin my plot! What do you think of yourself, hey?--
But I don't believe it."

He looked at her keenly, expecting a response, but Mary made him
none. For some moments he regarded her curiously, then turned
away into the study, saying:

"Come along. By Jove! I'm ashamed to say it, but I half begin to
believe in you. I did think I was past being taken in, but it
seems possible for once again. Of course, you will return to Mrs.
Redmain now that all is cleared up."

"It is impossible," Mary answered. "I can not live in a house
where the lady mistrusts and the gentleman insults me."

She left the room, and Mr. Redmain did not try to prevent her. As
she left the house she burst into tears; and the fact Mewks
carried to his master.

The man was the more careful to report everything about Mary,
that there was one in the house of whom he never reported
anything, but to whom, on the contrary, he told everything he
thought she would care to know. Till Sepia came, he had been
conventionally faithful--faithful with the faith of a lackey,
that is--but she had found no difficulty in making of him, in
respect of her, a spy upon his master.

I will now relate what passed while Mary sat deaf in the corner.

Mr. Redmain asked his visitor what he would have, as if, although
it was quite early, he must, as a matter of course, stand in need
of refreshment. He made choice of brandy and soda-water, and the
bell was rung. A good deal of conversation followed about a
disputed point in a late game of cards at one of the clubs.

The talk then veered in another direction--that of personal
adventure, so guided by Mr. Redmain. He told extravagant stories
about himself and his doings, in particular various _ruses_
by which he had contrived to lay his hands on money. And whatever
he told, his guest capped, narrating trick upon trick to which on
different occasions he had had recourse. At all of them Mr.
Redmain laughed heartily, and applauded their cleverness
extravagantly, though some of them were downright swindling.

At last Mr. Redmain told how he had once got money out of a lady.
I do not believe there was a word of truth in it. But it was
capped by the other with a narrative that seemed specially
pleasing to the listener. In the midst of a burst of laughter, he
rose and rang the bell. Count Galofta thought it was to order
something more in the way of "refreshment," and was not a little
surprised when he heard his host desire the man to request the
favor of Miss Yolland's presence. But the Count had not studied
non-expression in vain, and had brought it to a degree of
perfection not easily disturbed. Casting a glance at him as he
gave the message, Mr. Redmain could read nothing; but this was in
itself suspicious to him--and justly, for the man ought to have
been surprised at such a close to the conversation they had been
having.

Sepia had been told that Galofta was in the study, and therefore
received the summons thither--a thing that had never happened
before--with the greater alarm. She made, consequently, what
preparation she could against surprise. Thoroughly capable of
managing her features, her anxiety was sufficient nevertheless to
deprive her of power over her complexion, and she entered the
room with the pallor peculiar to the dark-skinned. Having greeted
the Count with the greatest composure, she turned to Mr. Redmain
with question in her eyes.

"Count Galofta," said Mr. Redmain in reply, "has just been
telling me a curious story of how a certain rascal got possession
of a valuable jewel from a lady with whom he pretended to be in
love, and I thought the opportunity a good one for showing you a
strange discovery I have made with regard to the sapphire Mrs.
Redmain missed for so long. Very odd tricks are played with gems
--such gems, that is, as are of value enough to make it worth a
rogue's while."

So saying, he took the ring from one drawer, and from another a
bottle, from which he poured something into a crystal cup. Then
he took a file, and, looking at Galofta, in whose well-drilled
features he believed he read something that was not mere
curiosity, said, "I am going to show you something very curious,"
and began to file asunder that part of the ring which immediately
clasped the sapphire, the setting of which was open.

"What a pity!" cried Sepia; "you are destroying the ring! What
will Cousin Hesper say?"

Mr. Redmain filed away, heedless; then with the help of a pair of
pincers freed the stone, and held it up in his hand.

"You see this?" he said.

"A splendid sapphire!" answered Count Galofta, taking it in his
fingers, but, as Mr. Redmain saw, not looking at it closely.

"I have always heard it called a splendid stone," said Sepia,
whose complexion, though not her features, passed through several
changes while all this was going on: she was anxious.

Nor did her inquisitor fail to surprise the uneasy glances she
threw, furtively though involuntarily, in the face of the Count--
who never once looked in hers: tolerably sure of himself, he was
not sure of her.

"That ring, when I bought it--the stone of it," said Mr. Redmain,
"was a star sapphire, and worth seven hundred pounds; now, the
whole affair is worth about ten."

As he spoke, he threw the stone into the cup, let it lie a few
moments, and took it out again; when, almost with a touch, he
divided it in two, the one a mere scale.

"There!" he said, holding out the thin part on the tip of a
finger, "that is a slice of sapphire; and there!" holding out the
rest of the seeming stone, "that is glass."

"What a shame!" cried Sepia.

"Of course," said the Count, "you will prosecute the jeweler."

"I will not prosecute the jeweler," answered Mr. Redmain; "but I
have taken some trouble to find out who changed the stones."

With that he threw both the bits of blue into a drawer, and the
contents of the cup into the fire. A great flame flew up the
chimney, and, as if struck at the sight of it, he stood gazing
for a moment after it had vanished.

When he turned, the Count was gone, as he had expected, and Sepia
stood with eyes full of anger and fear. Her face was set and
colorless, and strange to look upon.

"Very odd--ain't it?" said Mr. Redmain, and, opening the door of
his dressing-room, called out:

"Miss Marston!"

When he turned, Sepia too was gone.

I would not have my reader take Sepia for an accomplice in the
robbery. Even Mr. Redmain did not believe that: she was much too
prudent! His idea was, that she had been wearing the ring--Hesper
did not mind what she wore of hers--and that (I need not give his
conjecture in detail), with or without her knowledge, the fellow
had got hold of it and carried it away, then brought it back,
treating the thing as a joke, when she was only too glad to
restore it to the jewel-case, hoping the loss of it would then
pass for an oversight on the part of Hesper. If he was right in
this theory of the affair, then the Count had certainly a hold
upon her, and she dared not or would not expose him! He had
before discovered that, about the time when the ring disappeared,
the Count had had losses, and was supposed unable to meet them,
but had suddenly showed himself again "flush of money," and from
that time had had an extraordinary run of luck.

When he went out of the door of Mr. Redmain's study, he vanished
from the house and from London. Turning the first corner he came
to, and the next and the next, he stepped into a mews, the court
of which seemed empty, and slipped behind the gate. He wore a new
hat, and was clean shaved except his upper lip. Presently a man
came out of the mews in a Scotch cap and a full beard.

What had become of him Mr. Redmain did not care. He had no desire
to punish him. It was enough he had found him out, proved his
suspicion correct, and obtained evidence against Sepia. He did
not at once make up his mind how he would act on this last; while
he lived, it did not matter so much; and he had besides a certain
pleasure in watching his victim. But Hesper, free, rich, and
beautiful, and far from wise, with Sepia for counselor, was not
an idea to be contemplated with equanimity. Still he shrank from
the outcry and scandal of sending her away; for certainly his
wife, if it were but to oppose him, would refuse to believe a
word against her cousin.

For the present, therefore, the thing seemed to blow over. Mr.
Redmain, who had pleasure in behaving handsomely so far as money
was concerned, bought his wife the best sapphire he could find,
and, for once, really pleased her.

But Sepia knew that Mr. Redmain had now to himself justified his
dislike of her; and, as he said nothing, she was the more certain
he meant something. She lived, therefore, in constant dread of
his sudden vengeance, against which she could take no precaution,
for she had not even a conjecture as to what form it might
assume. From that hour she was never at peace in his presence,
and hardly out of it; from every possible _tete-a-tete_ with
him she fled as from a judgment.

Nor was it a small addition to her misery that she imagined Mary
cognizant of Mr. Redmain's opinion and intention with regard to
her, and holding the worst possible opinion of her. For, whatever
had passed first between the Count and Mr. Redmain, she did not
doubt Mary had heard, and was prepared to bring against her when
the determined moment should arrive. How much the Count might or
might not have said, she could not tell; but, seeing their common
enemy had permitted him to escape, she more than dreaded he had
sold her secret for his own impunity, and had laid upon her a
burden of lies as well.




CHAPTER XLVI.

REPARATION.


With all Mr. Redmain's faults, there was a certain love of
justice in the man; only, as is the case with most of us, it had
ten times the reference to the action of other people that it had
to his own: I mean, he made far greater demand for justice upon
other people than upon himself; and was much more indignant at
any shortcoming of theirs which crossed any desire or purpose of
his than ho was anxious in his own person to fulfill justice when
that fulfillment in its turn would cross any wish he cherished.
Badly as he had himself behaved to Mary, he was now furious with
his wife for having treated her so heartlessly that she could not
return to her service; for he began to think she might be one to
depend upon, and to desire her alliance in the matter of ousting
Sepia from the confidence of his wife.

However indifferent a woman may be to the opinion of her husband,
he can nevertheless in general manage to make her uncomfortable
enough if he chooses; and Mr. Redmain did choose now, in the
event of her opposition to his wishes: when he set himself to do
a thing, he hated defeat even more than he loved success.

The moment Mary was out of the study, he walked into his wife's
boudoir, and shut the door behind him. His presence there was
enough to make her angry, but she took no notice of it.

"I understand, Mrs. Redmain," he began, "that you wish to bring
the fate of Sodom upon the house."

"I do not know what you mean," she answered, scarcely raising her
eyes from her novel--and spoke the truth, for she knew next to
nothing of the Bible, while the Old Testament was all the
literature Mr. Redmain was "up in."

"You have turned out of it the only just person in it, and we
shall all be in hell soon!"

"How dare you come to my room with such horrid language!"

"You'll hear worse before long, if you keep on at this rate. My
language is not so bad as your actions. If you don't have that
girl back, and in double-quick time, too, I shall know how to
make you!"

"You have taught me to believe you capable of anything."

"You shall at least find me capable of a good deal. Do you
imagine, madam, I have found you a hair worse than I expected?"

"I never took the trouble to imagine anything about you."

"Then I need not ask you whether I married you to please you or
to please myself?"

"You need not. You can best answer that question yourself."

"Then we understand each other."

"We do not, Mr. Redmain; and, if this occurs again, I shall go to
Durnmelling."

She spoke with a vague idea that he also stood in some awe of the
father and mother whose dread, however well she hid it, she would
never, while she lived, succeed in shaking off. But to the
husband it was a rare delight to speak with conscious rectitude
in the moral chastisement of his wife. He burst into a loud and
almost merry laugh.

"Happy they will be to see you there, madam! Why, you goose, if I
send a telegram before you, they won't so much as open the door
to you! They know better which side their bread is buttered."

Hesper started up in a rage. This was too much--and the more too
much, that she believed it would be as he said.

"Mr. Redmain, if you do not leave the room, I will."

"Oh, don't!" he cried, in a tone of pretended alarm. His pleasure
was great, for he had succeeded in stinging the impenetrable.
"You really ought to consider before you utter such an awful
threat! I will go myself a thousand times rather!--But will you
not feel the want of pocket-money when you come to pay a rough
cabman? The check I gave you yesterday will not last you long."

"The money is my own, Mr. Redmain."

"But you have not yet opened a banking-account in your own name."

"I suppose you have a meaning, Mr. Redmain; but I am not in the
habit of using cabs."

"Then you had better get into the habit; for I swear to you,
madam, if you don't fetch that girl home within the week, I will,
next Monday, discharge your coachman, and send every horse in the
stable to Tattersall's! Good morning."

She had no doubt he would do as he said; she knew Mr. Redmain
would just enjoy selling her horses. But she could not at once
give in. I say "_could_ not," because hers was the weak will
that can hardly bring itself to do what it knows it must, and is
continually mistaken for the strong will that defies and endures.
She had a week to think about it, and she would see!

During the interval, he took care not once to refer to his
threat, for that would but weaken the impression of it, he knew.

On the Sunday, after service, she knocked at his door, and, being
admitted, bade him good morning, but with no very gracious air--
as, indeed, he would have been the last to expect.

"We have had a sermon on the forgiveness of injuries, Mr.
Redmain," she said.

"By Jove!" interrupted her husband, "it would have been more to
the purpose if I, or poor Mary Marston, had had it; for I swear
you put our souls in peril!"

"The ring was no common one, Mr. Redmain; and the young woman
had, by leaving the house, placed herself in a false position:
every one suspected her as much as I did. Besides, she lost her
temper, and talked about forgiving _me_, when I was in
despair about my ring!"

"And what, pray, was your foolish ring compared to the girl's
character?"

"A foolish ring, indeed!--Yes, it was foolish to let you ever
have the right to give it me! But, as to her character, that of
persons in her position is in constant peril. They have to lay
their account with that, and must get used to it. How was I to
know? We can not read each other's hearts."

"Not where there is no heart in the reader."

Hesper's face flushed, but she did her best not to lose her
temper. Not that it would have been any great loss if she had,
for there is as much difference in the values of tempers as in
those who lose them. She said nothing, and her husband resumed:

"So you came to forgive me?" he said.

"And Marston," she answered.

"Well, I will accept the condescension--that is, if the terms of
it are to my mind."

"I will make no terms. Marston may return when she pleases."

"You must write and ask her."

"Of course, Mr. Redmain. It would hardly be suitable that
_you_ should ask her."

"You must write so as to make it possible to accept your offer."

"I am not deceitful, Mr. Redmain."

"You are not. A man must be fair, even to his wife."

"I will show you the letter I write."

"If you please."

She had to show him half a score ere he was satisfied, declaring
he would do it himself, if she could not make a better job of it.

At length one was dispatched, received, and answered: Mary would
not return. She had lost all hope of being of any true service to
Mrs. Redmain, and she knew that, with Tom and Letty, she was
really of use for the present. Mrs. Redmain carried the letter,
with ill-concealed triumph, to her husband; nor did he conceal
his annoyance.

"You must have behaved to her very cruelly," he said. "But you
have done your best now--short of a Christian apology, which it
would be folly to demand of you. I fear we have seen the last of
her."--"And there was I," he said to himself, "for the first time
in my life, actually beginning to fancy I had perhaps thrown salt
upon the tail of that rare bird, an honest woman! The devil has
had quite as much to do with my history as with my character!
Perhaps that will be taken into the account one day."

But Mary lay awake at night, and thought of many things she might
have said and done better when she was with Hesper, and would
gladly have given herself another chance; but she could no longer
flatter herself she would ever be of any real good to her. She
believed there was more hope of Mr. Redmain even. For had she not
once, for one brief moment, seen him look a trifle ashamed of
himself? while Hesper was and remained, so far as she could
judge, altogether satisfied with herself. Equal to her own
demands upon herself, there was nothing in her to begin with--no
soil to work upon.




CHAPTER XLVII.

ANOTHER CHANGE.


For some time Tom made progress toward health, and was able to
read a good part of the day. Most evenings he asked Joseph to
play to him for a while; he was fond of music, and fonder still
of criticism--upon anything. When he had done with Joseph, or
when he did not want him, Mary was always ready to give the
latter a lesson; and, had he been a less gifted man than he was,
he could not have failed to make progress with such a teacher.

The large-hearted, delicate-souled woman felt nothing strange in
the presence of the workingman, but, on the contrary, was
comfortably aware of a being like her own, less privileged but
more gifted, whose nearness was strength. And no teacher, not to
say no woman, could have failed to be pleased at the thorough
painstaking with which he followed the slightest of her hints,
and the delight his flushed face would reveal when she praised
the success he had achieved.

It was not long before he began to write some of the things that
came into his mind. For the period of quiescence as to
production, which followed the initiation of more orderly study,
was, after all, but of short duration, and the return tide of
musical utterance was stronger than ever. Mary's delight was
great when first he brought her one of his compositions very
fairly written out--after which others followed with a rapidity
that astonished her. They enabled her also to understand the man
better and better; for to have a thing to brood over which we are
capable of understanding must be more to us than even the
master's playing of it. She could not be sure this or that was
correct, according to the sweet inexorability of musical
ordainment, but the more she pondered them, the more she felt
that the man was original, that the material was there, and the
law at hand, that he brought his music from the only bottomless
well of utterance, the truth, namely, by which alone the soul
most glorious in gladness, or any other the stupidest of souls,
can live.

To the first he brought her she contrived to put a poor little
faulty accompaniment; and when she played his air to him so
accompanied, his delight was touching, and not a little amusing.
Plainly he thought the accompaniment a triumph of human faculty,
and beyond anything he could ever develop. Never pupil was more
humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or
of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the
swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be
at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next
point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The
key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.

What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may
be requested to imagine. He was like a man seated on the grass
outside the heavenly gate, from which, slow-opening every evening
as the sun went down, came an angel to teach, and teach, until he
too should be fit to enter in: an hour would arrive when she
would no longer have to come out to him where he sat. Under such
an influence all that was gentlest and sweetest in his nature
might well develop with rapidity, and every accidental roughness
--and in him there was no other--by swift degrees vanish from both
speech and manners. The angels do not want tailors to make their
clothes: their habits come out of themselves. But we are often
too hard upon our fellows; for many of those in the higher ranks
of life--no, no, I mean of society--whose insolence wakens ours,
as growl wakes growl in the forest, are not yet so far removed
from the savage--I mean in their personal history--as some in the
lowest ranks. When a nobleman mistakes the love of right in
another for a hatred of refinement, he can not be far from
mistaking insolence for good manners. Of such a nobility, good
Lord, deliver us from all envy!

As to falling in love with a lady like Mary, such a thing was as
far from Jasper's consciousness as if she had been a duchess. She
belonged to another world from his, a world which his world
worshiped, waiting. He might miss her even to death; her absence
might, for him, darken the universe as if the sun had withdrawn
his brightness; but who thinks of falling in love with the sun,
or dreams of climbing nearer to his radiance?

The day will one day come--or what of the long-promised kingdom
of heaven?--when a woman, instead of spending anxious thought on
the adornment of her own outward person, will seek with might the
adornment of the inward soul of another, and will make that her
crown of rejoicing. Nay, are there none such even now? The day
will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the
overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the
personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like
St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention. O my brother,
what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother
beautiful!

Be not indignant, my reader: not for a moment did I imagine thee
capable of such a mean calling! It is left to a certain school of
weak enthusiasts, who believe that such growth, such
embellishment, such creation, is all God cares about; these
enthusiasts can not indeed see, so blind have they become with
their fixed idea, how God could care for anything else. They
actually believe that the very Son of the life-making God lived
and died for that, and for nothing else. That such men and women
are fools, is and has been so widely believed, that, to men of
the stamp of my indignant reader, it has become a fact! But the
end alone will reveal the beginning. Such a fool was Prometheus,
with the vulture at his heart--but greater than Jupiter with his
gods around him.

There soon came a change, however, and the lessons ceased
altogether.

Tom had come down to his old quarters, and, in the arrogance of
convalescence, had presumed on his imagined strength, and so
caught cold. An alarming relapse was the consequence, and there
was no more playing; for now his condition began to draw to a
change, of which, for some time, none of them had even thought,
the patient had seemed so certainly recovering. The cold settled
on his lungs, and he sank rapidly.

Joseph, whose violin was useless now, was not the less in
attendance. Every evening, when his work was over, he came
knocking gently at the door of the parlor, and never left until
Tom was settled for the night. The most silently helpful,
undemonstrative being he was, that doctor could desire to wait
upon patient. When it was his turn to watch, he never closed an
eye, but at daybreak--for it was now spring--would rouse Mary,
and go off straight to his work, nor taste food until the hour
for the mid-day meal arrived.

Tom speedily became aware that his days were numbered--phrase of
unbelief, for are they not numbered from the beginning? Are our
hairs numbered, and our days forgotten--till death gives a hint
to the doctor? He was sorry for his past life, and thoroughly
ashamed of much of it, saying in all honesty he would rather die
than fall for one solitary week into the old ways--not that he
wished to die, for, with the confidence of youth, he did not
believe he could fall into the old ways again. For my part, I
think he was taken away to have a little more of that care and
nursing which neither his mother nor his wife had been woman
enough to give the great baby. After all, he had not been one of
the worst of babies.

Is it strange that one so used to bad company and bad ways should
have so altered, in so short a time, and without any great
struggle? The assurance of death at the door, and a wholesome
shame of things that are past, may, I think, lead up to such a
swift change, even in a much worse man than Tom. For there is the
Life itself, all-surrounding, and ever pressing in upon the human
soul, wherever that soul will afford a chink of entrance; and Tom
had not yet sealed up all his doors.

When he lay there dead--for what excuse could we have for foolish
lamentation, if we did not speak of the loved as _lying
dead?_--Letty had him already enshrined in her heart as the
best of husbands--as her own Tom, who had never said a hard word
to her--as the cleverest as well as kindest of men who had
written poetry that would never die while the English language
was spoken. Nor did "The Firefly" spare its dole of homage to the
memory of one of its gayest writers. Indeed, all about its office
had loved him, each after his faculty. Even the boy cried when he
heard he was gone, for to him too he had always given a kind
word, coming and going. A certain little runnel of verse flowed
no more through the pages of "The Firefly," and in a month there
was not the shadow of Tom upon his age. But the print of him was
deep in the heart of Letty, and not shallow in the affection of
Mary; nor were such as these, insignificant records for any one
to leave behind him, as records go. Happy was he to have left
behind him any love, especially such a love as Letty bore him!
For what is the loudest praise of posterity to the quietest love
of one's own generation? For his mother, her memory was mostly in
her temper. She had never understood her wayward child, just
because she had given him her waywardness, and not parted with it
herself, so that between them the two made havoc of love. But she
who gives her child all he desires, in the hope of thus binding
his love to herself, no less than she who thwarts him in
everything, may rest assured of the neglect she has richly
earned. When she heard of his death, she howled and cursed her
fate, and the woman, meaning poor Letty, who had parted her and
her Tom, swearing she would never set eyes upon her, never let
her touch a farthing of Tom's money. She would not hear of paying
his debts until Mary told her she then would, upon which the fear
of public disapprobation wrought for right if not righteousness.

But what was Mary to do now with Letty? She was little more than
a baby yet, not silly from youth, but young from silliness.
Children must learn to walk, but not by being turned out alone in
Cheapside.

She was relieved from some perplexity for the present, however,
by the arrival of a letter from Mrs. Wardour to Letty, written in
a tone of stiffly condescendent compassion--not so unpleasant to
Letty as to her friend, because from childhood she had been used
to the nature that produced it, and had her mind full of a vast,
undefined notion of the superiority of the writer. It may be a
question whether those who fill our inexperienced minds with
false notions of their greatness, do us thereby more harm or
good; certainly when one comes to understand with what an
arrogance and self-assertion they have done so, putting into us
as reverence that which in them is conceit, one is ready to be
scornful more than enough; but, rather than have a child question
such claims, I would have him respect the meanest soul that ever
demanded respect; the first shall be last in good time, and the
power of revering come forth uninjured; whereas a child judging
his elders has already withered the blossom of his being.

But Mrs. Wardour's letter was kind-perhaps a little repentant; it
is hard to say, for ten persons will repent of a sin for one who
will confess it--I do not mean to the priest--that may be an easy
matter, but to the only one who has a claim to the confession,
namely, the person wronged. Yet such confession is in truth far
more needful to the wronger than to the wronged; it is a small
thing to be wronged, but a horrible thing to wrong.

The letter contained a poverty-stricken expression of sympathy,
and an invitation to spend the summer months with them at her old
home. It might, the letter said, prove but a dull place to her
after the gayety to which she had of late been accustomed, but it
might not the less suit her present sad situation, and possibly
uncertain prospects.

Letty's heart felt one little throb of gladness at the thought of
being again at Thornwick, and in peace. With all the probable
unpleasant accompaniments of the visit, nowhere else, she
thought, could she feel the same sense of shelter as where her
childhood had passed. Mary also was pleased; for, although Letty
might not be comfortable, the visit would end, and by that time
she might know what could be devised best for her comfort and
well-being.

--------------




CHAPTER XLVIII.

DISSOLUTION.


It was now Mary's turn to feel that she was, for the first time
in her life, about to be cut adrift--adrift, that is, as a world
is adrift, on the surest of paths, though without eyes to see.
For ten days or so, she could form no idea of what she was likely
or would like to do next. But, when we are in such perplexity,
may not the fact be accepted as showing that decision is not
required of us--perhaps just because our way is at the moment
being made straight for us?

Joseph called once or twice, but, for Letty's sake, they had no
music. As they met so seldom now, Mary, anxious to serve him as
she could, offered him the loan of some of her favorite books. He
accepted it with a gladness that surprised her, for she did not
know how much he had of late been reading.

One day she received an unexpected visit--from Mr. Brett, her
lawyer. He had been searching into the affairs of the shop, and
had discovered enough to make him uneasy, and indeed fill him
with self-reproach that he had not done so with more thoroughness
immediately on her father's death. He had come to tell her all he
knew, and talk the matter over with her, that they might agree
what proceedings should be taken.

I will not weary myself or my readers with business detail, for
which kind of thing I have no great aptitude, and a good deal of
incapacitating ignorance; but content myself with the briefest
statement of the condition in which Mr. Brett found the affairs
of Mr. Turnbull.

He had been speculating in several companies, making haste to be
rich, and had periled and lost what he had saved of the profits
of the business, and all of Mary's as well that had not been
elsewhere secured. He had even trenched on the original capital
of the firm, by postponing the payment of moneys due, and
allowing the stock to run down and to deteriorate, and things out
of fashion to accumulate, so that the business had perceptibly
fallen off. But what displeased Mary more than anything was, that
he had used money of her father's to speculate with in more than
one public-house; and she knew that, if in her father's lifetime
he had so used even his own, it would have been enough to make
him insist on dissolving partnership.

It was impossible to allow her money to remain any longer in the
power of such a man, and she gave authority to Mr. Brett to make
the necessary arrangements for putting an end to business
relations between them.

It was a somewhat complicated, therefore tedious business; and
things looked worse the further they were searched into. Unable
to varnish the facts to the experience of a professional eye, Mr.
Turnbull wrote Mary a letter almost cringing in its tone, begging
her to remember the years her father and he had been as brothers;
how she had grown up in the shop, and had been to him, until
misunderstandings arose, into the causes of which he could not
now enter, in the place of a daughter; and insisting that her
withdrawal from it had had no small share in the ruin of the
business. For these considerations, and, more than all, for the
memory of her father, he entreated her to leave things as they
were, to trust him to see after the interests of the daughter of
his old friend, and not insist upon measures which must end in a
forced sale, in the shutting up of the shop of Turnbull and
Marston, and the disgracing of her father's name along with his.

Mary replied that she was acting by the advice of her father's
lawyer, and with the regard she owed her father's memory, in
severing all connection with a man in whom she no longer had
confidence; and insisted that the business must be wound up as
soon as possible.

She instructed Mr. Brett, at the same time, that, if it could be
managed, she would prefer getting the shop, even at considerable
loss, into her own hands, with what stock might be in it, when
she would attempt to conduct the business on principles her
father would have approved, whereby she did not doubt of soon
restoring it to repute. While she had no intention, she said, of
selling so _well_ as Mr. Turnbull would fain have done, she
believed she would soon be able to buy to just as good advantage
as he. It would be necessary, however, to keep her desire a
secret, else Mr. Turnbull would be certain to frustrate it.

Mr. Brett approved of her plan, for he knew she was much
respected, and had many friends. Mr. Turnbull would be glad, he
said, to give up the whole to escape prosecution--that at least
was how Mary interpreted his somewhat technical statement of
affairs between them.

The swindler wrote again, begging for an interview--which she
declined, except in the presence of her lawyer.

She made up her mind that she would not go near Testbridge till
everything was settled, and the keys of the shop in Mr. Brett's
hands; and remained, therefore, where she was--with Letty, who to
keep her company delayed her departure as long as she could
without giving offense at Thornwick.

A few days before Letty was at last compelled to leave, Jasper
called, and heard about as much as they knew themselves of their
plans. When Mary said to him she would miss her pupil, he smiled
in a sort of abstracted way, as if not quite apprehending what
she said, which seemed to Mary a little odd, his manners in
essentials being those of a gentleman, as judged by one a little
more than a lady; for there is an unnamed degree higher than the
ordinary _lady_. So Mary was left alone--more alone than she
had ever been in her life. But she did not feel lonely, for the
best of reasons--that she never fancied herself alone, but knew
that she was not. Also she had books at her command, being one of
the few who can read; and there were picture-galleries to go to,
and music-lessons to be had. Of these last she crowded in as many
as her master could be persuaded to give her--for it would be
long, she knew, before she was able to have such again.

Joseph Jasper never came near her. She could not imagine why, and
was disappointed and puzzled. To know that Ann Byrom was in the
house was not a great comfort to her--she regarded so much that
Mary loved as of earth and not of heaven. God's world even she
despised, because men called it nature, and spoke of its
influences. But Mary did go up to see her now and then. Very
different she seemed from the time when first they were at work
together over Hesper's twilight dress! Ever since Mary had made
the acquaintance of her brother, she seemed to have changed
toward her. Perhaps she was jealous; perhaps she believed Mary
was confirming him in his bad ways. Just where they were all
three of one mind--just _there_ her rudimentary therefore
self-sufficient religion shut them out from her sympathy and
fellowship.

Alone, and with her time at her command, Mary was more inclined
than she had ever been, except for her father's company, to go to
church. The second Sunday after Letty left her, she went to the
one nearest, and in the congregation thought she saw Joseph. A
week before, she would have waited for him as he came out, but,
now that he seemed to avoid her, she would not, and went home
neither comforted by the sermon nor comfortable with herself. For
the parson, instead of recognizing, through all defects of the
actual, the pattern after which God had made man, would fain have
him remade after the pattern of the middle-age monk--a being far
superior, no doubt, to the most of his contemporaries, but as far
from the beauty of the perfect man as the mule is from that of
the horse; and she was annoyed with herself that she was annoyed
with Joseph. It was the middle of summer before the affairs of
the firm were wound up, and the shop in the hands of the London
man whom Mr. Brett had employed in the purchase.

Lawyer as he was, however, Mr. Brett had not been sharp enough
for Turnbull. The very next day, a shop in the same street, that
had been to let for some time, displayed above its now open door
the sign, _John Turnbull, late_--then a very small of--
_Turnbull and Marston;_ whereupon Mr. Brett saw the
oversight of which he had been guilty. There was nothing in the
shop when it was opened, but that Turnbull utilized for
advertisement: he had so arranged, that within an hour the goods
began to arrive, and kept arriving, by every train, for days and
days after, while all the time he made public show of himself,
fussing about, the most triumphant man in the town. It made
people talk, and if not always as he would have liked to hear
them talk, yet it was talk, and, in the matter of advertisement,
that is the main thing.

When it was told Mary, it gave her not the smallest uneasiness.
She only saw what had several times seemed on the point of
arriving in her father's lifetime. She would not have moved a
finger to prevent it. Let the two principles meet, with what
result God pleased!

Whether he had suspected her design, and had determined to
challenge her before the public, I can not tell; but his wife's
aversion to shopkeeping was so great, that one who knew what sort
of scene passed because of it between them, would have expected
that, but for some very strong reason, he would have been glad
enough to retire from that mode of gaining a livelihood. As it
was, things appeared to go on with them just as before. They
still inhabited the villa, the wife scornful of her surroundings,
and the husband driving a good horse to his shop every morning.
How he managed it all, nobody knew but himself, and whether he
succeeded or not was a matter of small interest to any except his
own family and his creditors. He was a man nowise beloved,
although there was something about him that carried simple people
with him--for his ends, not theirs. To those who alluded to the
change, he represented it as entirely his own doing, to be rid of
the interference of Miss Marston in matters of which she knew
nothing. He knew well that a confident lie has all the look of
truth, and, while fact and falsehood were disputing together in
men's mouths, he would be selling his drapery. The country people
were flattered by the confidence he seemed to put in them by this
explanation, and those who liked him before sought the new shop
as they had frequented the old one.

Unlike most men, not to say lawyers, Mr. Brett was fully
recognizant to Mary of his oversight, and was not a little
relieved to be assured she would not have had the thing
otherwise: she would gladly meet Mr. Turnbull in a fair field--
not that she would in the least acknowledge or think of him as a
rival; she would simply carry out her own ideas of right, without
regard to him or any measures he might take; the result should be
as God willed. Mr. Brett shook his head: he knew her father of
old, and saw the daughter prepared to go beyond the father.
Theirs were principles that did not come within the range of his
practice! He said to himself and his wife that the world could
not go on for a twelvemonth if such ways were to become
universal: whether by the world he meant his own profession, I
will not inquire. Certainly he did not make the reflection that
the new ways are intended to throw out the old ways; and the
worst argument against any way is that the world can not go on
so; for that is just what is wanted--that the world should not go
on so. Mr. Brett nevertheless admired not only Mary's pluck, but
the business faculty which every moment she manifested: there is
a holy way of doing business, and, little as business men may
think it, that is the standard by which they must be tried; for
their judge in business affairs is not their own trade or
profession, but the man who came to convince the world concerning
right and wrong and the choice between them; or, in the older
speech-to reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgment.




CHAPTER XLIX.

THORNWICK.


It was almost with bewilderment that Mrs. Helmer revisited
Thornwick. The near past seemed to have vanished like a dream
that leaves a sorrow behind it, and the far past to take its
place. She had never been accustomed to reflect on her own
feelings; things came, were welcome or unwelcome, proved better
or worse than she had anticipated, passed away, and were mostly
forgotten. With plenty of faculty, Letty had not yet emerged from
the chrysalid condition; she lived much as one in a dream, with
whose dream mingle sounds and glimmers from the waking world.
Very few of us are awake, very few even alive in true, availing
sense. "Pooh! what stuff!" says the sleeper, and will say it
until the waking begins to come.

On the threshold of her old home, then, Letty found her old self
awaiting her; she crossed it, and was once more just Letty, a
Letty wrapped in the garments of sorrow, and with a heaviness at
the heart, but far from such a miserable Letty as during the last
of her former life there. Little joy had been hers since the
terrible night when she fled from its closed doors; and now that
she returned, she could take up everything where she had left it,
except the gladness. But peace is better than gladness, and she
was on the way to find that.

Mrs. Wardour, who, for all her severity, was not without a good-
sized heart, and whoso conscience had spoken to her in regard of
Letty far oftener than any torture would have made her allow, was
touched with compassion at sight of her worn and sad look; and,
granting to herself that the poor thing had been punished enough,
even for her want of respect to the house of Thornwick, broke
down a little, though with well-preserved dignity, and took the
wandering ewe-lamb to her bosom. Letty, loving and forgiving
always, nestled in it for a moment, and in her own room quietly
wept a long time. When she came out, Mrs. Wardour pleased herself
with the fancy that her eyes were red with the tears of
repentance; but Letty never dreamed of repenting, for that would
have been to deny Tom, to cut off her married life, throw it from
her, and never more see Tom.

By degrees, rapid yet easy, she slid into all her old ways; took
again the charge of the dairy as if she had never left it;
attended to the linen; darned the stockings; and in everything
but her pale, thin face, and heavy, exhausted heart, was the
young Letty again. She even went to the harness-room to look to
Cousin Godfrey's stirrups and bits; but finding, morning after
morning for a whole week, that they had not once been neglected,
dismissed the care-not without satisfaction.

Mrs. Wardour continued kind to her; but every now and then would
allow a tone as of remembered naughtiness to be sub-audible in
speech or request. Letty, even in her own heart, never resented
it. She had been so used to it in the old days, that it seemed
only natural. And then her aunt considered her health in the
kindest way. Now that Letty had known some of the troubles of
marriage, she felt more sympathy with her, did not look down upon
her from quite such a height, and to Letty this was strangely
delightful. Oh, what a dry, hard, cold world this would grow to,
but for the blessing of its many sicknesses!

When Godfrey saw her moving about the house as in former days,
but changed, like one of the ghosts of his saddest dreams, a new
love began to rise out of the buried seed of the old. In vain he
reasoned with himself, in vain ho resisted. The image of Letty,
with its trusting eyes fixed on him so "solemn sad," and its
watching looks full of ministration, haunted him, and was too
much for him. She was never the sort of woman he could have
fancied himself falling in love with; he did in fact say to
himself that she was only _almost_ a lady-but at the word
his heart rebuked him for a traitor to love and its holy laws.
Neither in person was she at all his ideal. A woman like Hesper,
uplifted and strong, broad-fronted and fearless, large-limbed,
and full of latent life, was more of the ideal he could have
written poetry about. But we are deeper than we know. Who is
capable of knowing his own ideal? The ideal of a man's self is
hid in the bosom of God, and may lie ages away from his
knowledge; and his ideal of woman is the ideal belonging to this
unknown self: the ideal only can bring forth an ideal. He can
not, therefore, know his own ideal of woman; it is, nevertheless
--so I presume--this his own unknown ideal that makes a man choose
against his choice. Gladly would Godfrey now have taken Letty to
his arms. It was no longer anything that from boyhood he had
vowed rather to die unmarried, and let the land go to a stranger,
than marry a widow. He had to recall every restraining fact of
his and her position to prevent him from now precipitating that
which he had before too long delayed. But the gulf of the grave
and the jealousy of a mother were between them; for, if he were
again to rouse her suspicions, she would certainly get rid of
Letty, as she had before intended, so depriving her of a home,
and him of opportunity. He kept, therefore, out of Letty's way as
much as he could, went more about the farm, and took long rides.

Nothing was further from Letty than any merest suspicion of the
sort of regard Godfrey cherished for her. There was in her
nothing of the self-sentimental. Her poet was gone from her, but
she did not therefore take to poetry; nay, what poetry she had
learned to like was no longer anything to her, now her singing
bird had flown to the land of song. To her, Tom was the greatest,
the one poet of the age; he had been hers--was hers still, for
did ho not die telling her that he would go on watching till she
came to him? He had loved her, she knew; he had learned to love
her better before he died. She must be patient; the day would
come when she should be a Psyche, as he had told her, and soar
aloft in search of her mate. The sense of wifehood had grown one
with her consciousness. It mingled with all her prayers, both in
chamber and in church. As she went about the house, she was
dreaming of her Tom--an angel in heaven, she said to herself, but
none the less her husband, and waiting for her. If she did not
read poetry, she read her New Testament; and if she understood it
only in a childish fashion, she obeyed it in a child-like one,
whence the way of all wisdom lay open before her. It is not where
one is, but in what direction he is going. Before her, too, was
her little boy--borne in his father's arms, she pictured him, and
hearing from him of the mother who was coming to them by and by,
when God had made her good enough to rejoin them!

But, while she continued thus simple, Godfrey could not fail to
see how much more of a woman she had grown: he was not yet
capable of seeing that she would--could never hare got so far
with him, even if he had married her.

Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the
making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so
unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those
desired and expected, that it is hard for not a few to believe
that he is anywhere looking after their fate--caring about them
at all. And the doubt would be a reasonable one, if the end of
things was marriage. But the end is life--that we become the
children of God; after which, all things can and will go their
grand, natural course; the heart of the Father will be content
for his children, and the hearts of the children will be content
in their Father.

Godfrey indulged one great and serious mistake in reference to
Letty, namely, that, having learned the character of Tom through
the saddest of personal experience, she must have come to think
of him as he did, and must have dismissed from her heart every
remnant of love for him. Of course, he would not hint at such a
thing, he said to himself, nor would she for a moment allow it,
but nothing else could be the state of her mind! He did not know
that in a woman's love there is more of the specially divine
element than in a man's--namely, the original, the unmediated.
The first of God's love is not founded upon any merit, rests only
on being and need, and the worth that is yet unborn.

The Redmains were again at Durnmelling--had been for some weeks;
and Sepia had taken care that she and Godfrey should meet--on the
footpath to Testbridge, in the field accessible by the breach in
the ha-ha--here and there and anywhere suitable for a little
detention and talk that should seem accidental, and be out of
sight. Nor was Godfrey the man to be insensible to the influence
of such a woman, brought to bear at close quarters. A man less
vulnerable--I hate the word, but it is the right one with Sepia
concerned, for she was, in truth, an enemy--might perhaps have
yielded room to the suspicion that these meetings were not all so
accidental as they appeared, and as Sepia treated them; but no
glimmer of such a thought passed through the mind of Godfrey. He
knew nothing of all that my readers know to Sepia's disadvantage,
and her eyes were enough to subdue most men from the first--for a
time at least. Had it not been for the return of Letty, she would
by this time have had him her slave: nothing but slavery could it
ever be to love a woman like her, who gave no love in return,
only exercised power. But although he was always glad to meet
her, and his heart had begun to beat a little faster at sight of
her approach, the glamour of her presence was nearly destroyed by
the arrival of Letty; and Sepia was more than sharp enough to
perceive a difference in the expression of his eyes the next time
she met him. At the very first glance she suspected some hostile
influence at work--intentionally hostile, for persons with a
consciousness like Sepia's are always imagining enemies. And as
the two worst enemies she could have were the truth and a woman,
she was alternately jealous and terrified: the truth and a woman
together, she had not yet begun to fear; that would, indeed, be
too much!

She soon found there was a young woman at Thornwick, who had but
just arrived; and ere long she learned who she was--one, indeed,
who had already a shadowy existence in her life--was it possible
the shadow should be now taking solidity, and threatening to foil
her? Not once did it occur to her that, were it so, there would
be retribution in it. She had heard of Tom's death through "The
Firefly," which had a kind, extravagant article about him, but
she had not once thought of his widow--and there she was, a hedge
across the path she wanted to go! If the house of Durnmelling had
but been one story higher, that she might see all round
Thornwick!

For some time now, as I have already more than hinted, Sepia had
been fashioning a man to her thrall--Mewks, namely, the body-
servant of Mr. Redmain. It was a very gradual process she had
adopted, and it had been the more successful. It had got so far
with him that whatever Sepia showed the least wish to understand,
Mewks would take endless trouble to learn for her. The rest of
the servants, both at Durnmelling and in London, were none of
them very friendly with her--least of all Jemima, who was now
with her mistress as lady's-maid, the accomplished attendant whom
Hesper had procured in place of Mary being away for a holiday.

The more Sepia realized, or thought she realized, the position
she was in, the more desirous was she to get out of it, and the
only feasible and safe way, in her eyes, was marriage: there was
nothing between that and a return to what she counted slavery.
Rather than lift again such a hideous load of irksomeness, she
would find her way out of a world in which it was not possible,
she said, to be both good and comfortable: she had, in truth,
tried only the latter. But if she could, she thought, secure for
a husband this gentleman-yeoman, she might hold up her head with
the best. Even if Galofta should reappear, she would know then
how to meet him: with a friend or two, such as she had never had
yet, she could do what she pleased! It was hard work to get on
quite alone--or with people who cared only for themselves! She
must have some love on her side! some one who cared for
_her_!

From all she could learn, there was nothing that amounted even to
ordinary friendship between Mr. Wardour and the young widow. She
was in the family but as a distant poor relation--"Much as I am
myself!" thought Sepia, with a bitter laugh that even in her own
eyes she should be comparable to a poor creature like Letty. The
fact, however, remained that Godfrey was a little altered toward
her: she must have been telling him something against her--
something she had heard from that detestable little hypocrite who
was turned away on suspicion of theft! Yes--that was how Sepia
talked _to herself_ about Mary.

One morning, Letty, finding she had an hour's leisure, for her
aunt did not pursue her as of old time, wandered out to the oak
on the edge of the ha-ha, so memorable with the shadowy presence
of her Tom. She had not been seated under it many minutes before
Godfrey caught sight of her from his horse's back: knowing his
mother was gone to Testbridge, he yielded to an urgent longing,
took his horse to the stable, and crossed the grass to where she
sat.

Letty was thinking of Tom--what else was there of her own to do?-
-thinking like a child, looking up into the cloud-flecked sky,
and thinking Tom was somewhere there, though she could not see
him: she must be good and patient, that she might go up to him,
as he could not come down to her--if he could, he would have come
long ago! All the enchantment of the first days of her love had
come back upon the young widow; all the ill that had crept in
between had failed from out her memory, as the false notes in
music melt in the air that carries the true ones across ravine
and river, meadow and grove, to the listening ear. Letty lived in
a dream of her husband--in heaven, "yet not from her"--such a
dream of bliss and hope as in itself went far to make up for all
her sorrows.

She was sitting with her back toward the tree and her face to
Thornwick, and yet she did not see Godfrey till he was within a
few yards of her. She smiled, expecting his kind greeting, but
was startled to hear from behind her instead the voice of a lady
greeting him. She turned her head involuntarily: there was the
head of Sepia rising above the breach in the ha-ha, and Godfrey
had turned aside and run to give her his hand.

Now Letty knew Sepia by sight, from the evening she had spent at
the old hall; more of her she knew nothing. From the mind of Tom,
in his illness, her baleful influence had vanished like an evil
dream, and Mary had not thought it necessary to let him know how
falsely, contemptuously, and contemptibly, she had behaved toward
him. Letty, therefore, had no feeling toward Sepia but one of
admiration for her grace and beauty, which she could appreciate
the more that they were so different from her own.

"Thank you," said Sepia, holding fast by Godfrey's hand, and
coming up with a little pant. "What a lovely day it is for your
haymaking! How can you afford the time to play knight-errant to a
distressed damsel?"

"The hay is nearly independent of my presence," replied Godfrey.
"Sun and wind have done their parts too well for my being of much
use."

"Take me with you to see how they are getting on. I am as fond of
hay as Bottom in his translation."

She had learned Godfrey's love of literature, and knew that one
quotation may stand for much knowledge.

"I will, with pleasure," said Godfrey, perhaps a little consoled
in the midst of his disappointment; and they walked away, neither
taking notice of Letty.

"I did not know," she said to herself, "that the two houses had
come together at last! What a handsome couple they make!"

What passed between them is scarcely worthy of record. It is
enough to say that Sepia found her companion distrait, and he
felt her a little invasive. In a short while they came back
together, and Sepia saw Letty under the great bough of the
Durnmelling oak. Godfrey handed her down the rent, careful
himself not to invade Durnmelling with a single foot. She ran
home, and up to a certain window with her opera-glass. But the
branches and foliage of the huge oak would have concealed pairs
and pairs of lovers.

Godfrey turned toward Letty. She had not stirred.

"What a beautiful creature Miss Yolland is!" she said, looking up
with a smile of welcome, and a calmness that prevented the
slightest suspicion of a flattering jealousy.

"I was coming to _you_," returned Godfrey. "I never saw her
till her head came up over the ha-ha.--Yes, she is beautiful--at
least, she has good eyes."

"They are splendid! What a wife she would make for you, Cousin
Godfrey! I should like to see such a two."

Letty was beyond the faintest suggestion of coquetry. Her words
drove a sting to the heart of Godfrey. He turned pale. But not a
word would he have spoken then, had not Letty in her innocence
gone on to torture him. She sprang from the ground.

"Are you ill, Cousin Godfrey?" she cried in alarm, and with that
sweet tremor of the voice that shows the heart is near. "You are
quite white!--Oh, dear! I've said something I oughtn't to have
said! What can it be? Do forgive me, Cousin Godfrey." In her
childlike anxiety she would have thrown her arms round his neck,
but her hands only reached his shoulders. He drew back: such was
the nature of the man that every sting tasted of offense. But he
mastered himself, and in his turn, alarmed at the idea of having
possibly hurt her, caught her hands in his. As they stood
regarding each other with troubled eyes, the embankment of his
prudence gave way, and the stored passion broke out.

"You don't _mean_ you would like to see me married, Letty?"
he groaned.

"Yes, indeed, I do, Cousin Godfrey! You would make such a lovely
husband!"

"Ah! I thought as much! I knew you never cared for me, Letty!"

He dropped her hands, and turned half aside, like a figure warped
with fire.

"I care for you more than anybody in the world--except, perhaps,
Mary," said Letty: truthfulness was a part of her.

"And I care for you more than all the world!--more than very
being--it is worthless without you. O Letty! your eyes haunt me
night and day! I love you with my whole soul."

"How kind of you, Cousin Godfrey!" faltered Letty, trembling, and
not knowing what she said. She was very frightened, but hardly
knew why, for the idea of Godfrey in love with her was all but
inconceivable. Nevertheless, its approach was terrible. Like a
fascinated bird she could not take her eyes off his face. Her
knees began to fail her; it was all she could do to stand. But
Godfrey was full of himself, and had not the most shadowy
suspicion of how she felt. He took her emotion for a favorable
sign, and stupidly went on:

"Letty, I can't help it! I know I oughtn't to speak to you like
this--so soon, but I can't keep quiet any longer. I love you more
than the universe and its Maker. A thousand times rather would I
cease to live, than live without you to love me. I have loved you
for years and years--longer than I know. I was loving you with
heart and soul and brain and eyes when you went away and left
me."

"Cousin Godfrey!" shrieked Letty, "don't you know I belong to
Tom?"

And she dropped like one lifeless on the grass at his feet.

Godfrey felt as if suddenly damned; and his hell was death. He
stood gazing on the white face. The world, heaven, God, and
nature were dead, and that was the soul of it all, dead before
him! But such death is never born of love. This agony was but the
fog of disappointed self-love; and out of it suddenly rose what
seemed a new power to live, but one from a lower world: it was
all a wretched dream, out of which he was no more to issue, in
which he must go on for ever, dreaming, yet acting as one wide
awake! Mechanically he stooped and lifted the death-defying lover
in his arms, and carried her to the house. He felt no thrill as
he held the treasure to his heart. It was the merest material
contact. He bore her to the room where his mother sat, laid her
on the sofa, said he had found her under the oak-tree--and went
to his study, away in the roof. On a chair in the middle of the
floor he sat, like a man bereft of all. Nothing came between him
and suicide but an infinite scorn. A slow rage devoured his
heart. Here he was, a man who knew his own worth, his
faithfulness, his unchangeableness, cast over the wall of the
universe, into the waste places, among the broken shards of ruin!
If there was a God--and the rage in his heart declared his being
--why did he make him? To make him for such a misery was pure
injustice, was willful cruelty! Henceforward he would live above
what God or woman could do to him! He rose and went to the hay-
field, whence he did not return till after midnight.

He did not sleep, but he came to a resolution. In the morning he
told his mother that he wanted a change; now that the hay was
safe, he would have a run, he hardly knew where--possibly on the
Continent; she must not be uneasy if she did not hear from him
for a week or two; perhaps he would have a look at the pyramids.
The old lady was filled with dismay; but scarcely had she begun
to expostulate when she saw in his eyes that something was
seriously amiss, and held her peace--she had had to learn that
with both father and son. Godfrey went, and courted distraction.
Ten years before, he would have brooded: that he would not do
now: the thing was not worth it! His pride was strong as ever,
and both helped him to get over his suffering, and prevented him
from gaining the good of it. He intrenched himself in his pride.
No one should say he had not had his will! He was a strong man,
and was going to prove it to himself afresh!

Thus thought Godfrey; but he is in reality a weak man who must
have recourse to pride to carry him through. Only, if a man has
not love enough to make a hero of him, what is he to do?

He was away a month, and came back in seeming health and spirits.
But it was no small relief to him to find on his arrival that
Letty was no longer at Thornwick.

She had gone through a sore time. To have made Godfrey unhappy,
made her miserable; but how was she to help it? She belonged to
Tom! Not once did she entertain the thought of ceasing to be
Tom's. She did not even say to herself, what would Tom do if she
forgot and forsook him--and for what he could not help! for
having left her because death took him away! But what was she to
do? She must not remain where she was. No more must she tell his
mother why she went.

She wrote to Mary, and told her she could not stay much longer.
They were very kind, she said, but she must be gone before
Godfrey came back.

Mary suspected the truth. The fact that Letty did not give her
any reason was almost enough. The supposition also rendered
intelligible the strange mixture of misery and hardness in
Godfrey's behavior at the time of Letty's old mishap. She
answered, begging her to keep her mind easy about the future, and
her friend informed of whatever concerned her.

This much from Mary was enough to set Letty at comparative ease.
She began to recover strength, and was able to write a letter to
Godfrey, to leave where he would find it, in his study.

It was a lovely letter--the utterance of a simple, childlike
spirit--with much in it, too, I confess, that was but prettily
childish. She poured out on Godfrey the affection of a
womanchild. She told him what a reverence and love he had been to
her always; told him, too, that it would change her love into
fear, perhaps something worse, if he tried to make her forget
Tom. She told him he was much too grand for her to dare love him
in that way, but she could look up to him like an angel--only he
must not come between her and Tom. Nothing could be plainer,
simpler, honester, or stronger, than the way the little woman
wrote her mind to the great man. Had he been worthy of her, he
might even yet, with her help, have got above his passion in a
grand way, and been a great man indeed. But, as so many do, he
only sat upon himself, kept himself down, and sank far below his
passion.

When he went to his study the day after his return, he saw the
letter. His heart leaped like a wild thing in a trap at sight of
the ill-shaped, childish writing; but--will my lady reader
believe it?--the first thought that shot through it was--"She
shall find it too late! I am not one to be left and taken at
will!" When he read it, however, it was with a curling lip of
scorn at the childishness of the creature to whom he had offered
the heart of Godfrey Wardour. Instead of admiring the lovely
devotion of the girl-widow to her boy-husband, he scorned himself
for having dreamed of a creature who could not only love a fool
like Tom Helmer, but go on loving him after he was dead, and that
even when Godfrey Wardour had condescended to let her know he
loved her. It was thus the devil befooled him. Perhaps the worst
devil a man can be posessed withal, is himself. In mere madness,
the man is beside himself; but in this case he is inside himself;
the presiding, indwelling, inspiring sprit of him is himself, and
that is the hardest of all to cast out. Godfrey rose form the
reading of that letter _cured,_ as he called it. But it was
a cure that left the wound open as a door to the entrance of evil
things. He tore the letter into a thousand pieces, and throw them
into the empty grate--not even showed it the respect of burning
it with fire.

Mary had got her affairs settled, and was again in the old place,
the hallowed temple of so many holy memories. I do not forget it
was a shop I call a temple. In that shop God had been worshiped
with holiest worship--that is, obedience--and would be again.
Neither do I forget that the devil had been worshiped there too--
in what temple is he not? He has fallen like lightning from
heaven, but has not yet been cast out of the earth. In that shop,
however, he would be worshiped no more for a season.

At once she wrote to Letty, saying the room which had been hers
was at her service as soon as she pleased to occupy it: she would
take her father's.

Letty breathed a deep breath of redemption, and made haste to
accept the offer. But to let Mrs. Wardour know her resolve was a
severe strain on her courage.

I will not give the conversation that followed her announcement
that she was going to visit Mary Marston. Her aunt met it with
scorn and indignation. Ingratitude, laziness, love of low
company, all the old words of offense she threw afresh in her
face. But Letty could not help being pleased to find that her
aunt's storm no longer swamped her boat. When she began, however,
to abuse Mary, calling her a low creature, who actually gave up
an independent position to put herself at the beck and call of a
fine lady, Letty grew angry.

"I must not sit and hear you call Mary names, aunt," she said.
"When you cast me out, she stood by me. You do not understand
her. She is the only friend I ever had-except Tom."

"You dare, you thankless hussy, to say such a thing in the house
where you've been clothed and fed and sheltered for so many
years! You're the child of your father with a vengeance! Get out
of my sight!"

"Aunt--" said Letty, rising.

"No aunt of yours!" interrupted the wrathful woman.

"Mrs. Wardour," said Letty, with dignity, "you have been my
benefactor, but hardly my friend: Mary has taught me the
difference. I owe you more than you will ever give me the chance
of repaying you. But what friendship could have stood for an hour
the hard words you have been in the way of giving me, as far back
as I can remember! Hard words take all the sweetness from
shelter. Mary is the only Christian _I_ have ever known."

"So we are all pagans, except your low-lived lady's-maid! Upon my
word!"

"She makes me feel, often, often," said Letty, bursting into
tears, "as if I were with Jesus himself--as if he must be in the
room somewhere."

So saying, she left her, and went to put up her things. Mrs.
Wardour locked the door of the room where she sat, and refused to
see or speak to her again. Letty went away, and walked to
Testbridge.

"Godfrey will do something to make her understand," she said to
herself, weeping as she walked.

Whether Godfrey ever did, I can not tell.




CHAPTER L.

WILLIAM AND MARY MARSTON.


The same day on which Turnbull opened his new shop, a man was
seen on a ladder painting out the sign above the old one. But the
paint took time to dry.

The same day, also, Mary returned to Testbridge, and, going in by
the kitchen-door, went up to her father's room, of which and of
her own she had kept the keys--to the indignation of Turnbull,
who declared he did not know how to get on without them for
storage. But, for all his bluster, he was afraid of Mary, and did
not dare touch anything she had left.

That night she spent alone in the house. But she could not sleep.
She got up and went down to the shop. It was a bright, moonlit
night, and all the house, even where the moon could not enter,
was full of glimmer and gleam, except the shop. There she lighted
a candle, sat down on a pile of goods, and gave herself up to
memories of the past. Back and back went her thoughts as far as
she could send them. God was everywhere in all the story; and the
clearer she saw him there the surer she was that she would find
him as she went on. She was neither sad nor fearful. The dead
hours of the night came, that valley of the shadow of death where
faith seems to grow weary and sleep, and all the things of the
shadow wake up and come out and say, "Here we are, and there is
nothing but us and our kind in the universe!" They woke up and
came out upon Mary now, but she fought them off. Either there is
mighty, triumphant life at the root and apex of all things, or
life is not--and whence, then, the power of dreaming horrors? It
is life alone--life imperfect--that can fear; death can not fear.
Even the terror that walketh by night is a proof that I live, and
that it shall not prevail against me. And to Mary, besides her
heavenly Father, her William Marston seemed near all the time.
Whereever she turned she saw the signs of him, and she pleased
herself to think that perhaps he was there to welcome her. But it
would not have made her the least sad to know for certain that he
was far off, and would never come near her again in this world.
She knew that, spite of time and space, she was and must be near
him so long as she loved and did the truth. She knew there is no
bond so strong, none so close, none so lasting as the truth. In
God alone, who is the truth, can creatures meet.

The place was left in sad confusion and dirt, and she did not a
little that night to restore order at least. But at length she
was tired, and went up to her room.

On the first landing there was a window to the street. She
stopped and looked out, candle in hand, but drew back with a
start: on the opposite side of the way stood a man, looking up,
she thought, at the house! She hastened to her room, and to bed.
If God was not watching, no waking was of use; and if God was
watching, she might sleep in peace. She did sleep, and woke
refreshed.

Her first care in the morning was to write to Letty--with the
result I have set down. The next thing she did was to go and ask
Beenie to give her some breakfast. The old woman was delighted to
see her, and ready to lock her door at once and go back to her
old quarters. They returned together, while Testbridge was yet
but half awake.

Many things had to be done before the shop could be opened.
Beenie went after charwomen, and soon a great bustle of cleaning
arose. But the door was kept shut, and the front windows.

In the afternoon Letty came fresh from misery into more than
counterbalancing joy. She took but time to put off her bonnet and
shawl, and was presently at work helping Mary, cheerful as hope
and a good conscience could make her.

Mary was in no hurry to open the shop. There was "stock to be
taken," many things had to be rearranged, and not a few things to
be added, before she could begin with comfort; and she must see
to it all herself, for she was determined to engage no assistant
until she could give her orders without hesitation.

She was soon satisfied that she could not do better than make a
proposal to Letty which she had for some time contemplated--
namely, that she should take up her permanent abode with her, and
help her in the shop. Letty was charmed, nor ever thought of the
annoyance it would be to her aunt. Mary had thought of that, but
saw that, for Letty to allow the prejudices of her aunt to
influence her, would be to order her life not by the law of that
God whose Son was a workingman, but after the whim and folly of
an ill-educated old woman. A new spring of life seemed to bubble
up in Letty the moment Mary mentioned the matter; and in serving
she soon proved herself one after Mary's own heart. Letty's day
was henceforth without a care, and her rest was sweet to her.
Many customers were even more pleased with her than with Mary.
Before long, Mary, besides her salary, gave her a small share in
the business.

Mrs. Wardour carried her custom to the Turnbulls.

When the paint was dry which obliterated the old sign, people
saw the now one begin with an _M_., and the sign-writer went
on until there stood in full, _Mary Marston_. Mr. Brett
hinted he would rather have seen it without the Christian name;
but Mary insisted she would do and be nothing she would not hold
just that name to; and on the sign her own name, neither more nor
less, should stand. She would have liked, she said, to make it
_William and Mary Marston_; for the business was to go on
exactly as her father had taught her; the spirit of her father
should never be out of the place; and if she failed, of which she
had no fear, she would fail trying to carry out his ideas-but
people were too dull to understand, and she therefore set the
sign so in her heart only.

Her old friends soon began to come about her again, and it was
not many weeks before she saw fit to go to London to add to her
stock.

The evening of her return, as she and Letty sat over a late tea,
a silence fell, during which Letty had a brooding fit.

"I wonder how Cousin Godfrey is getting on?" she said at last,
and smiled sadly.

"How do you mean _getting on_?" asked Mary.

"I was wondering whether Miss Yolland and he--"

Mary started from her seat, white as the table-cloth.

"Letty!" she said, in a voice of utter dismay, "you don't mean
that woman is--is making friends with _him_?"

"I saw them together more than once, and they seemed--well, on
very good terms."

"Then it is all over with him!" cried Mary, in despair. "O Letty!
what _is_ to be done? Why didn't you tell me before? He'll
be madly in love with her by this time! They always are."

"But where's the harm, Mary? She's a very handsome lady, and of a
good family."

"We're all of good enough family," said Mary, a little
petulantly. "But that Miss Yolland--Letty--that Miss Yolland--
she's a bad woman, Letty."

"I never heard you say such a hard word of anybody before, Mary!
It frightens me to hear you."

"It's a true word of her, Letty."

"How can you be so sure?"

Mary was silent. There was that about Letty that made the maiden
shrink from telling the married woman what she knew. Besides, in
so far as Tom had been concerned, she could not bring herself,
even without mentioning his name, to talk of him to his wife:
there was no evil to be prevented and no good to be done by it.
If Letty was ever to know those passages in his life, she must
hear them first in high places, and from the lips of the
repentant man himself!

"I can not tell you, Letty," she said. "You know the two bonds of
friendship are the right of silence and the duty of speech. I
dare say you have some things which, truly as I know you love me,
you neither wish nor feel at liberty to tell me."

Letty thought of what had so lately passed between her and her
cousin Godfrey, and felt almost guilty. She never thought of one
of the many things Tom had done or said that had cut her to the
heart; those had no longer any existence. They were swallowed in
the gulf of forgetful love--dismissed even as God casts the sins
of his children behind his back: behind God's back is just
nowhere. She did not answer, and again there was silence for a
time, during which Mary kept walking about the room, her hands
clasped behind her, the fingers interlaced, and twisted with a
strain almost fierce.

"There's no time! there's no time!" she cried at length. "How are
we to find out? And if we knew all about it, what could we do? O
Letty! what _am_ I to do?"

"Anyhow, Mary dear, _you_ can't be to blame! One would think
you fancied yourself accountable for Cousin Godfrey!"

"I _am_ accountable for him. He has done more for me than
any man but my father; and I know what he does not know, and what
the ignorance of will be his ruin. I know that one of the best
men in the world"--so in her agony she called him--"is in danger
of being married by one of the worst women; and I can't bear it--
I can't bear it!"

"But what can you do, Mary?"

"That's what I want to know," returned Mary, with irritation.
"What _am_ I to do? What _am_ I to do?"

"If he's in love with her, he wouldn't believe a word any one--
even you--told him against her."

"That is true, I suppose; but it won't clear me. I must do
something."

She threw herself on the couch with a groan.

"It's horrid!" she cried, and buried her face in the pillow.

All this time Letty had been so bewildered by Mary's agitation,
and the cause of it was to her so vague, that apprehension for
her cousin did not wake. But when Mary was silent, then came the
thought that, if she had not so repulsed him--but she could not
help it, and would not think in that direction.

Mary started from the couch, and began again to pace the room,
wringing her hands, and walking up and down like a wild beast in
its cage. It was so unlike her to be thus seriously discomposed,
that Letty began to be frightened. She sat silent and looked at
her. Then spoke the spirit of truth in the scholar, for the
teacher was too troubled to hear. She rose, and going up to Mary
from behind, put her arm round her, and whispered in her ear:

"Mary, why don't you ask Jesus?"

Mary stopped short, and looked at Letty. But she was not thinking
about her; she was questioning herself: why had she not done as
Letty said? Something was wrong with her: that was clear, if
nothing else was! She threw herself again on the couch, and Letty
saw her body heaving with her sobs. Then Letty was more
frightened, and feared she had done wrong. Was it her part to
remind Mary of what she knew so much better than she?

"But, then, I was only referring her to herself!" she thought.

A few minutes, and Mary rose. Her face was wet and white, but
perplexity had vanished from it, and resolution had taken its
place. She threw her arms round Letty, and kissed her, and held
her face against hers. Letty had never seen in her such an
expression of emotion and tenderness.

"I have found out, Letty, dear," she said. "Thank you, thank you,
Letty! You are a true sister."

"What have you found out, Mary?"

"I have found out why I did not go at once to ask Him what I
ought to do. It was just because I was afraid of what he would
tell me to do."

And with that the tears ran down her cheeks afresh.

"Then you know now what to do?" asked Letty.

"Yes," answered Mary, and sat down.




CHAPTER LI.

A HARD TASK.


The next morning, leaving the shop to Letty, Mary set out
immediately after breakfast to go to Thornwick. But the duty she
had there to perform was so distasteful, that she felt her very
limbs refuse the office required of them. They trembled so under
her that she could scarcely walk. She sent, therefore, to the
neighboring inn for a fly. All the way, as she went, she was
hoping she might be spared an encounter with Mrs. Wardour; but
the old lady heard the fly, saw her get out, and, imagining she
had brought Letty back in some fresh trouble, hastened to prevent
either of them from entering the house. The door stood open, and
they met on the broad step.

"Good morning, Mrs. Wardour," said Mary, trying to speak without
betraying emotion.

"Good morning, Miss Marston," returned Mrs. Wardour, grimly.

"Is Mr. Wardour at home?" asked Mary.

"What is your business with _him_?" rejoined the mother.

"Yes; it is with him," returned Mary, as if she had mistaken her
question, and there had been a point of exclamation after the
_What_.

"About that hussy?"

"I do not know whom you call by the name," replied Mary, who
would have been glad indeed to find a fellow-protector of Godfrey
in his mother.

"You know well enough whom I mean. Whom should it be, but Letty
Lovel!"

"My business has nothing to do with her," answered Mary.

"Whom has it to do with, then?"

"With Mr. Wardour."

"What is it?"

"Only Mr. Wardour himself must hear it. It is his business, not
mine."

"I will have nothing to do with it."

"I have no desire to give you the least trouble about it,"
rejoined Mary.

"You can't see Mr. Wardour. He's not one to be at the beck and
call of every silly woman that wants him."

"Then I will write, and tell him I called, but you would not
allow me to see him."

"I will give him a message, if you like."

"Then tell him what I have just said. I am going home to write to
him. Good morning."

She was getting into the fly again, when Mrs. Wardour, reflecting
that it must needs be something of consequence that brought her
there so early in a fly, and made her show such a determined
front to so great a personage as herself, spoke again.

"I will tell him you are here; but you must not blame me if he
does not choose to see you. We don't feel you have behaved well
about that girl."

"Letty is my friend. I have behaved to her as if she were my
sister."

"You had no business to behave to her as if she were your sister.
You had no right to tempt her down to your level."

"Is it degradation to earn one's own living?"

"You had nothing to do with her. She would have done very well if
you had but let her alone."

"Excuse me, ma'am, but I have _some_ right in Letty. I am
sorry to have to assert it, but she would have been dead long ago
if I had behaved to her as you would have me."

"That was all her own fault."

"I will not talk with you about it: you do not know the
circumstances to which I refer. I request to see Mr. Wardour. I
have no time to waste in useless altercation."

Mary was angry, and it did her good; it made her fitter to face
the harder task before her.

That moment they heard the step of Godfrey approaching through a
long passage in the rear. His mother went into the parlor,
leaving the door, which was close to where Mary stood, ajar.
Godfrey, reaching the hall, saw Mary, and came up to her with a
formal bow, and a face flushed with displeasure.

"May I speak to you alone, Mr. Wardour?" said Mary. "Can you not
say what you have to say here?"

"It is impossible."

"Then I am curious to know--"

"Let your curiosity plead for me, then."

With a sigh of impatience he yielded, and led the way to the
drawing-room, which was at the other end of the hall. Mary turned
and shut the door he left open.

"Why all this mystery, Miss Marston?" he said. "I am not aware of
anything between you and me that can require secrecy."

He spoke with unconcealed scorn.

"When I have made my communication, you will at least allow
secrecy to have been necessary."

"Some objects may require it!" said Wardour, in a tone itself an
insult.

"Mr. Wardour," returned Mary, "I am here for your sake, not my
own. May I beg you will not render a painful duty yet more
difficult?"

"May _I_ beg, then, that you will be as brief as possible? I
am more than doubtful whether what you have to say will seem to
me of so much consequence as you suppose."

"I shall be very glad to find it so."

"I can not give you more than ten minutes." Mary looked at her
watch.

"You have lately become acquainted with Miss Yolland, I am told,"
she began.

"Whew!" whistled Godfrey, yet hardly as if he were surprised.

"I have been compelled to know a good deal of that lady."

"As lady's-maid in her family, I believe."

"Yes," said Mary--then changing her tone after a slight pause,
went on: "Mr. Wardour, I owe you more than I can ever thank you
for. I strongly desire to fulfill the obligation your goodness
has laid upon me, though I can never discharge it. For the sake
of that obligation--for your sake, I am risking much--namely,
your opinion of me."

He made a gesture of impatience.

"I _know_ Miss Yolland to be a woman without principle. I
know it by the testimony of my own eyes, and from her own
confession. She is capable of playing a cold-hearted, cruel game
for her own ends. Be persuaded to consult Mr. Redmain before you
commit yourself. Ask him if Miss Yolland is fit to be the wife of
an honest man."

There was nothing in Godfrey's countenance but growing rage.
Turning to the door, Mary would have gone without another word.

"Stay!" cried Godfrey, in a voice of suppressed fury. "Do not
dare to go until I have told you that you are a vile slanderer. I
knew something of what I had to expect, but you should never have
entered this room had I known how far your effrontery could carry
you. Listen to me: if anything more than the character of your
statement had been necessary to satisfy me of the falsehood of
every word of it, you have given it me in your reference to Mr.
Redmain--a man whose life has rendered him unfit for the
acquaintance, not to say the confidence of any decent woman. This
is a plot--for what final object, God knows--between you and him!
I should be doing my duty were I to expose you both to the public
scorn you deserve."

"Now I am clear!" said Mary to herself, but aloud, and stood
erect, with glowing face and eyes of indignation: "Then why not
do your duty, Mr. Wardour? I should be glad of anything that
would open your eyes. But Miss Yolland will never give Mr.
Redmain such an opportunity. Nor does he desire it, for he might
have had it long ago, by the criminal prosecution of a friend of
hers. For my part, I should be sorry to see her brought to public
shame."

"Leave the house!" said Godfrey through his teeth, and almost
under his breath.

"I am sorry it is so hard to distinguish between truth and
falsehood," said Mary, as she went to the door.

She walked out, got into the fly, and drove home; went into the
shop, and served the rest of the morning; but in the afternoon
was obliged to lie down, and did not appear again for three days.

The reception she had met with did not much surprise her: plainly
Sepia had been before her. She had pretended to make Godfrey her
confidant, had invented, dressed, and poured out injuries to him,
and so blocked up the way to all testimony unfavorable to her.
Was there ever man in more pitiable position?

It added to Godfrey's rage that he had not a doubt Mary knew what
had passed between Letty and him. That, he reasoned, was at the
root of it all: she wanted to bring them together yet: it would
be a fine thing for her to have her bosom-friend mistress of
Thornwick! What a cursed thing he should ever have been civil to
her! And what a cursed fool he was ever to have cared a straw for
such a low-minded creature as that Letty! Thank Heaven, he was
cured of that!

Cured?--He had fallen away from love--that was all the cure!

Like the knight of the Red Cross, he was punished for abandoning
Una, by falling in love with Duessa. His rage against Letty, just
because of her faithfulness, had cast him an easy prey into the
arms of the clinging Sepia.

And now what more could Mary do? Just one thing was left: Mr.
Redmain could satisfy Mr. Wardour of the fact he would not hear
from her!--so, at least, thought Mary yet. If Mr. Redmain would
take the trouble to speak to him, Mr. Wardour must be convinced!
However true might be what Mr. Wardour had said about Mr.
Redmain, fact remained fact about Sepia!

She sat down and wrote the following letter:

"Sir: I hardly know how to address you without seeming to take a
liberty; at the same time I can not help hoping you trust me
enough to believe that I would not venture such a request as I am
about to make, without good reason. Should you kindly judge me
not to presume, and should you be well enough in health, which I
fear may not be the case, would you mind coming to see me here in
my shop? I think you must know it--it used to be Turnbull and
Marston--the Marston was my father. You will see my name over the
door. Any hour from morning to night will do for me; only please
let it be as soon as you can make it convenient.

  "I am, sir,
  "Your humble and grateful servant,
  "MARY MARSTON"

"What the deuce is she grateful to me for?" grumbled Mr. Redmain
when he read it. "I never did anything for her! By Jove, the
gypsy herself wouldn't let me! I vow she's got more brains of her
own than any half-dozen women I ever had to do with before!"

The least thing bearing the look of plot, or intrigue, or secret
to be discovered or heard, was enough for Mr. Redmain. What he
had of pride was not of the same sort as Wardour's: it made no
pretense to dignity, and was less antagonistic, so long at least
as there was no talk of good motive or righteous purpose. Far
from being offended with Mary's request, he got up at once,
though indeed he was rather unwell and dreading an attack,
ordered his brougham, and drove to Testbridge. There, careful of
secrecy, he went to several shops, and bought something at each,
but pretended not to find the thing he wanted.

He then said he would lunch at the inn, told his coachman to put
up, and, while his meal was getting ready, went to Mary's shop,
which was but a few doors off. There he asked for a certain
outlandish stuff, and insisted on looking over a bale not yet
unpacked. Mary understood him, and, whispering Letty to take him
to the parlor, followed a minute after.

As soon as she entered--

"Come, now, what's it all about?" he said.

Mary began at once to tell him, as directly as she could, that
she was under obligation to Mr. Wardour of Thornwick, and that
she had reason to fear Miss Yolland was trying to get a hold of
him--"And you know what that would be for any man!" she said.

"No, by Jove! I don't," he answered. "What would it be?"

"Utter ruin," replied Mary. "Then go and tell him so, if you want
to save him."

"I have told him. But he does not like me, and won't believe me."

"Then let him take his own course, and be ruined."

"But I have just told you, sir, I am under obligation to him--
great obligation!"

"Oh! I see! you want him yourself!--Well, as you wish it, I would
rather you should have him than that she-devil. But come, now,
you must be open with me."

"I am. I will be."

"You say so, of course. Women do.--But you confess you want him
yourself?"

Mary saw it would be the worst possible policy to be angry with
him, especially as she had given him the trouble to come to her,
and she must not lose this her last chance.

"I do not want him," she answered, with a smile; "and, if I did,
he would never look at one in my position. He would as soon think
of marrying the daughter of one of his laborers--and quite right,
too--for the one might just be as good as the other."

"Well, now, that's a pity. I would have done a good deal for
_you_--I don't know why, for you're a little humbug if ever
there was one! But, if you don't care about the fellow, I don't
see why I should take the trouble. Confess--you're a little bit
in love with him--ain't you, now? Confess to that, and I will do
what I can."

"I can't confess to a lie. I owe Mr. Wardour a debt of gratitude
--that is all--but no light thing, you will allow, sir!"

"I don't know; I never tried its weight. Anyhow, I should make
haste to be rid of it."

"I have sought to make him this return, but he only fancies me a
calumniator. Miss Yolland has been beforehand with me."

"Then, by Jove! I don't see but you're quits with him. If he
behaves like that to you, don't you see, it wipes it all out?
Upon my soul! I don't see why you should trouble your head about
him. Let him take his way, and go to--Sepia."

"But, sir, what a dreadful thing it would be, knowing what she
is, to let a man like him throw himself away on her!"

"I don't see it. I've no doubt he's just as bad as she is. We all
are; we're all the same. And, if he weren't, it would be the
better joke. Besides, you oughtn't to keep up a grudge, don't you
know; you ought to let the--the _woman_ have a chance. If he
marries her--and that must be her game this time--she'll grow
decent, and be respectable ever after, you may be sure--go to
church, as you would have her, and all that--never miss a Sunday,
I'll lay you a thousand."

"He's of a good old family!" said Mary, foolishly, thinking that
would weigh with him.

"Good old fiddlestick! Damned old worn-out broom-end!
_She's_ of a good old family--quite good enough for his, you
may take your oath! Why, my girl! the thing's not worth burning
your fingers with. You've brought me here on a goose-errand. I'll
go and have my lunch."

He rose.

"I'm sorry to have vexed you, sir," said Mary, greatly
disappointed.

"Never mind.--I'm horribly sold," he said, with a tight grin. "I
thought you must have some good thing in hand to make it worth
your while to send for me."

"Then I must try something else," reflected Mary aloud.

"I wouldn't advise you. The man's only the surer to hate you and
stick to her. Let him alone. If he's a stuck-up fellow like that,
it will take him down a bit--when the truth comes out, that is,
as come out it must. There's one good thing in it, my wife'll get
rid of her. But I don't know! there's an enemy, as the Bible
says, that sticketh closer than a brother. And they'll be next
door when Durnmelling is mine! But I can sell it."

"If he _should_ come to you, will you tell him the truth?"

"I don't know that. It might spoil my own little game."

"Will you let him think me a liar and slanderer?"

"No, by Jove! I won't do that. I don't promise to tell him all
the truth, or even that what I do tell him shall be exactly true;
but I won't let him think ill of my little puritan; that would
spoil _your_ game. Ta, ta!"

He went out, with his curious grin, amused, and enjoying the idea
of a proud fellow like that being taken in with Sepia.

"I hope devoutly he'll marry her!" he said to himself as he went
to his luncheon. "Then I shall hold a rod over them both, and
perhaps buy that miserable little Thornwick. Mortimer would give
the skin off his back for it."

The thing that ought to be done had to be done, and Mary had done
it--alas! to no purpose for the end desired: what was left her to
do further? She could think of nothing. Sepia, like a moral
hyena, must range her night. She went to bed, and dreamed she was
pursued by a crowd, hooting after her, and calling her all the
terrible names of those who spread evil reports. She woke in
misery, and slept no more.




CHAPTER LII.

A SUMMONS.


One hot Saturday afternoon, in the sleepiest time of the day,
when nothing was doing; and nobody in the shop, except a poor boy
who had come begging for some string to help him fly his kite,
though for the last month wind had been more scarce than string,
Jemima came in from Durnmelling, and, greeting Mary with the
warmth of the friendship that had always been true between them,
gave her a letter.

"Whom is this from?" asked Mary, with the usual human waste of
inquiry, seeing she held the surest answer in her hand.

"Mr. Mewks gave it me," said Jemima. "He didn't say whom it was
from."

Mary made haste to open it: she had an instinctive distrust of
everything that passed through Mewks's hands, and greatly feared
that, much as his master trusted him, he was not true to him. She
found the following note from Mr. Redmain:

"DEAR MISS MARSTON: Come and see me as soon as you can; I have
something to talk to you about. Send word by the bearer when I
may look for you. I am not well.

"Yours truly,

"F. G. REDMAIN."

Mary went to her desk and wrote a reply, saying she would be with
him the next morning about eleven o'clock. She would have gone
that same night, she said, but, as it was Saturday, she could
not, because of country customers, close in time to go so far.

"Give it into Mr. Redmain's own hand, if you can, Jemima," she
said.

"I will try; but I doubt if I can, miss," answered the girl.

"Between ourselves, Jemima," said Mary, "I do not trust that man
Mewks."

"Nobody does, miss, except the master and Miss Yolland."

"Then," thought Mary, "the thing is worse than I had supposed."

"I'll do what I can, miss," Jemima went on. "But he's so sharp!--
Mr. Mewks, I mean."

After she was gone, Mary wished she had given her a verbal
message; that she might have insisted on delivering in person.

Jemima, with circumspection, managed to reach Mr. Redmain's room
unencountered, but just as she knocked at the door, Mewks came
behind her from somewhere, and snatching the letter out of her
hand, for she carried it ready to justify her entrance to the
first glance of her irritable master, pushed her rudely away, and
immediately went in. But as he did so he put the letter in his
pocket.

"Who took the note?" asked his master.

"The girl at the lodge, sir."

"Is she not come back yet?"

"No, sir, not yet. She'll be in a minute, though. I saw her
coming up the avenue."

"Go and bring her here."

"Yes, sir."

Mewks went, and in two minutes returned with the letter, and the
message that Miss Marston hadn't time to direct it.

"You damned rascal! I told you to bring the messenger here."

"She ran the whole way, sir, and not being very strong, was that
tired, that, the moment she got in, the poor thing dropped in a
dead faint. They ain't got her to yet."

His master gave him one look straight in the eyes, then opened
the letter, and read it.

"Miss Marston will call here tomorrow morning," he said; "see
that _she_ is shown up at once--here, to my sitting-room. I
hope I am explicit."

When the man was gone, Mr. Redmain nodded his head three times,
and grinned the skin tight as a drum-head over his cheek-bones.

"There isn't a damned soul of them to be trusted!" he said to
himself, and sat silently thoughtful.

Perhaps he was thinking how often he had come short of the hope
placed in him; times of reflection arrive to most men; and a
threatened attack of the illness he believed must one day carry
him off, might well have disposed him to think.

In the evening he was worse.

By midnight he was in agony, and Lady Margaret was up with him
all night. In the morning came a lull, and Lady Margaret went to
bed. His wife had not come near him. But Sepia might have been
seen, more than once or twice, hovering about his door.

Both she and Mewks thought, after such a night, he must have
forgotten his appointment with Mary.

When he had had some chocolate, he fell into a doze. But his
sleep was far from profound. Often he woke and again dozed off.

The clock in the dressing-room struck eleven.

"Show Miss Marston up the moment she arrives," he said--and his
voice was almost like that of a man in health.

"Yes, sir," replied the startled Mewks, and felt he must obey.

So Mary was at once shown to the chamber of the sick man.

To her surprise (for Mewks had given her no warning), he was in
bed, and looking as ill as ever she had seen him. His small head
was like a skull covered with parchment. He made the slightest of
signs to her to come nearer--and again. She went close to the
bed. Mewks sat down at the foot of it, out of sight. It was a
great four-post-bed, with curtains.

"I'm glad you're come," he said, with a feeble grin, all he had
for a smile. "I want to have a little talk with you. But I can't
while that brute is sitting there. I have been suffering
horribly. Look at me, and tell me if you think I am going to die
--not that I take your opinion for worth anything. That's not what
I wanted you for, though. I wasn't so ill then. But I want you
the more to talk to now. _You_ have a bit of a heart, even
for people that don't deserve it--at least I'm going to believe
you have; and, if I am wrong, I almost think I would rather not
know it till I'm dead and gone!--Good God! where shall I be
then?"

I have already said that, whether in consequence of remnants of
mother-teaching or from the movements of a conscience that had
more vitality than any of his so-called friends would have
credited it with, Mr. Redmain, as often as his sufferings reached
a certain point, was subject to fits of terror--horrible anguish
it sometimes amounted to--at the thought of hell. This, of
course, was silly, seeing hell is out of fashion in far wider
circles than that of Mayfair; but denial does not alter fact, and
not always fear. Mr. Redmain laughed when he was well, and shook
when he was suffering. In vain he argued with himself that what
he held by when in health was much more likely to be true than a
dread which might be but the suggestion of the disease that was
slowly gnawing him to death: as often as the sickness returned,
he received the suggestion afresh, whatever might be its source,
and trembled as before. In vain he accused himself of cowardice--
the thing was there--_in him_--nothing could drive it out.
And, verily, even a madman may be wiser than the prudent of this
world; and the courage of not a few would forsake them if they
dared but look the danger in the face. I pity the poor ostrich,
and must I admire the man of whose kind he is the type, or take
him in any sense for a man of courage? Wait till the thing stares
you in the face, and then, whether you be brave man or coward,
you will at all events care little about courage or cowardice.
The nearer a man is to being a true man, the sooner will
conscience of wrong make a coward of him; and herein Redmain had
a far-off kindred with the just. After the night he had passed,
he was now in one of his terror-fits; and this much may be said
for his good sense--that, if there was anywhere a hell for the
use of anybody, he was justified in anticipating a free entrance.

"Mewks!" he called, suddenly, and his tone was loud and angry.

Mewks was by his bedside instantly.

"Get out with you! If I find you in this room again, without
having been called, I will kill you! I am strong enough for that,
even without this pain. They won't hang a dying man, and where I
am going they will rather like it."

Mewks vanished.

"You need not mind, my girl," he went on, to Mary. "Everybody
knows I am ill--very ill. Sit down there, on the foot of the bed,
only take care you don't shake it, and let me talk to you.
People, you know, say nowadays there ain't any hell--or perhaps
none to speak of?"

"I should think the former more likely than the latter," said
Mary.

"You don't believe there is any? I _am_ glad of that! for
you are a good girl, and ought to know."

"You mistake me, sir. How can I imagine there is no hell, when
_he_ said there was?"

"Who's _he_?"

"The man who knows all about it, and means to put a stop to it
some day."

"Oh, yes; I see! Hm!--But I don't for the life of me see what a
fellow is to make of it all--don't you know? Those parsons! They
will have it there's no way out of it but theirs, and I never
could see a handle anywhere to that door!"

"_I_ don't see what the parsons have got to do with it, or,
at least, what you have got to do with the parsons. If a thing is
true, you have as much to do with it as any parson in England; if
it is not true, neither you nor they have anything to do with
it."

"But, I tell you, if it be all as true as--as--that we are all
sinners, I don't know what to do with it!"

"It seems to me a simple thing. _That_ man as much as said
he knew all about it, and came to find men that were lost, and
take them home."

"He can't well find one more lost than I am! But how am I to
believe it? How can it be true? It's ages since he was here, if
ever he was at all, and there hasn't been a sign of him ever
since, all the time!"

"There you may be quite wrong. I think I could find you some who
believe him just as near them now as ever he was to his own
brothers--believe that he hears them when they speak to him, and
heeds what they say."

"That's bosh. You would have me believe against the evidence of
my senses!"

"You must have strange senses, Mr. Redmain, that give you
evidence where they can't possibly know anything! If that man
spoke the truth when he was in the world, he is near us now; if
he is not near us, there is an end of it all."

"The nearer he is, the worse for me!" sighed Mr. Redmain.

"The nearer he is, the better for the worst man that ever
breathed."

"That's queer doctrine! Mind you, I don't say it mayn't be all
right. But it does seem a cowardly thing to go asking him to save
you, after you've been all your life doing what ought to damn
you--if there be a hell, mind you, that is."

"But think," said Mary, "if that should be your only chance of
being able to make up for the mischief you have done? No
punishment you can have will do anything for that. No suffering
of yours will do anything for those you have made suffer. But it
is so much harder to leave the old way than to go on and let
things take their chance!"

"There may be something in what you say; but still I can't see it
anything better than sneaking, to do a world of mischief, and
then slink away into heaven, leaving all the poor wretches to
look after themselves."

"I don't think Jesus Christ is worse pleased with you for feeling
like that," said Mary.

"Eh? What? What's that you say?--Jesus Christ worse pleased with
me? That's a good one! As if he ever thought about a fellow like
me!"

"If he did not, you would not be thinking about him just this
minute, I suspect. There's no sense in it, if he does not think
about you. He said himself he didn't come to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance."

"I wish I could repent."

"You can, if you will."

"I can't make myself sorry for what's gone and done with."

"No; it wants him to do that. But you can turn from your old
ways, and ask him to take you for a pupil. Aren't you willing to
learn, if he be willing to teach you?"

"I don't know. It's all so dull and stupid! I never could bear
going to church."

"It's not one bit like that! It's like going to your mother, and
saying you're going to try to be a good boy, and not vex her any
more."

"I see. It's all right, I dare say! But I've had as much of it as
I can stand! You see, I'm not used to such things. You go away,
and send Mewks. Don't be far off, though, and mind you don't go
home without letting me know. There! Go along."

She had just reached the door, when he called her again.

"I say! Mind whom you trust in this house. There's no harm in
Mrs. Redmain; she only grows stupid directly she don't like a
thing. But that Miss Yolland!--that woman's the devil. I know
more about her than you or any one else. I can't bear her to be
about Hesper; but, if I told her the half I know, she would not
believe the half of that. I shall find a way, though. But I am
forgetting! you know her as well as I do--that is, you would, if
you were wicked enough to understand. I will tell you one of
these days what, I am going to do. There! don't say a word. I
want no advice on _such_ things. Go along, and send Mewks."

With all his suspicion of the man, Mr. Redmain did not suspect
_how_ false Mewks was: he did not know that Miss Yolland had
bewitched him for the sake of having an ally in the enemy's camp.
All he could hear--and the dressing-room door was handy--the
fellow duly reported to her. Already, instructed by her fears,
she had almost divined what Mr. Redmain meant to do.

Mary went and sat on the lowest step of the stair just outside
the room.

"What are you doing there?" said Lady Margaret, coming from the
corridor.

"Mr. Redmain will not have me go yet, my lady," answered Mary,
rising. "I must wait first till he sends for me."

Lady Margaret swept past her, murmuring, "Most peculiar!" Mary
sat down again.

In about an hour, Mewks came and said his master wanted her.

He was very ill, and could not talk, but he would not let her go.
He made her sit where he could see her, and now and then
stretched out his hand to her. Even in his pain he showed a
quieter spirit. "Something may be working--who can tell!" thought
Mary.

It was late in the afternoon when at length he sought further
conversation.

"I have been thinking, Mary," he said, "that if I do wake up in
hell when I die, no matter how much I deserve it, nobody will be
the better for it, and I shall be all the worse."

He spoke with coolness, but it was by a powerful effort: he had
waked from a frightful dream, drenched from head to foot. Coward?
No. He had reason to fear.

"Whereas," rejoined Mary, taking up his clew, "everybody will be
the better if you keep out of it--everybody," she repeated, "--
God, and Jesus Christ, and all their people."

"How do you make that out?" he asked. "God has more to do than
look after such as me."

"You think he has so many worlds to look to--thousands of them
only making? But why does he care about his worlds? Is it not
because they are the schools of his souls? And why should he care
for the souls? Is it not because he is making them children--his
own children to understand him and be happy with his happiness?"

"I can't say I care for his happiness. I want my own. And yet I
don't know any that's worth the worry of it. No; I would rather
be put out like a candle."

"That's because you have been a disobedient child, taking your
own way, and turning God's good things to evil. You don't know
what a splendid thing life is. You actually and truly don't know,
never experienced in your being the very thing you were made
for."

"My father had no business to leave me so much money."

"You had no business to misuse it."

"I didn't _quite_ know what _I_ was doing."

"You do now."

Then came a pause.

"You think God hears prayer--do you?"

"I do."

"Then I wish you would ask him to let me off--I mean, to let me
die right out when I do die." What's the good of making a body
miserable?"

"That, I am sure it would be of no use to pray for. He certainly
will not throw away a thing he has made, because that thing may
be foolish enough to prefer the dust-hole to a cabinet."

"Wouldn't you do it now, if I asked you?"

"I would not. I would leave you in God's hands rather than inside
the gate of heaven."

"I don't understand you. And you wouldn't say so if you cared for
me! Only, why should you care for me?"

"I would give my life for you."

"Come, now! I don't believe that."

"Why, I couldn't be a Christian if I wouldn't!"

"You are getting absurd!" he cried. But he did not look exactly
as if he thought it.

"Absurd!" repeated Mary. "Isn't that what makes _him_ our
Saviour? How could I be his disciple, if I wouldn't do as he
did?"

"You are saying a good deal!"

"Can't you see that I have no choice?"

"_I_ wouldn't do that for anybody under the sun!"

"You are not his disciple. You have not been going about with
him."

"And you have?"

"Yes--for many years. Besides, I can not help thinking there is
one for whom you would do it."

"If you mean my wife, you never were more mistaken. I would do
nothing of the sort."

"I did not mean your wife. I mean Jesus Christ."

"Oh, I dare say! Well, perhaps; if I knew him as you do, and if I
were quite sure he wanted it done for him."

"He does want it done for him--always and every day--not for his
own sake, though it does make him very glad. To give up your way
for his is to die for him; and, when any one will do that, then
he is able to do everything for him; for then, and not till then,
he gets such a hold of him that he can lift him up, and set him
down beside himself. That's how my father used to teach me, and
now I see it for myself to be true."

"It's all very grand, no doubt; but it ain't nowhere, you know.
It's all in your own head, and nowhere else. You don't, you
_can't_ positively believe all that!"

"So much, at least, that I live in the strength and hope it gives
me, and order my ways according to it."

"Why didn't you teach my wife so?"

"I tried, but she didn't care to think. I could not get any
further with her. She has had no trouble yet to make her listen."

"By Jove! I should have thought marrying a fellow like me might
have been trouble enough to make a saint of her."

It was impossible to fix him to any line of thought, and Mary did
not attempt it. To move the child in him was more than all
argument.

A pause followed. "I don't love God," he said.

"I dare say not," replied Mary. "How should you, when you don't
know him?"

"Then what's to be done? I can't very well show myself where I
hate the master of the house!"

"If you knew him, you would love him."

"You are judging by yourself. But there is as much difference
between you and me as between light and darkness."

"Not quite that," replied Mary, with one of those smiles that
used to make her father feel as if she were that moment come
fresh from God to him. "If you knew Jesus Christ, you could not
help loving him, and to love him is to love God."

"You wear me out! Will you never come to the point? _Know Jesus
Christ!_ How am I to go back two thousand years?"

"What he was then he is now," answered Mary. "And you may even
know him better than they did at the time who saw him; for it was
not until they understood him better, by his being taken from
them, that they wrote down his life."

"I suppose you mean I must read the New Testament?" said Mr.
Redmain, pettishly.

"Of course!" answered Mary, a little surprised; for she was
unaware how few have a notion what the New Testament is, or is
meant for.

"Then why didn't you say so at first? There I have you! That's
just where I learn that I must be damned for ever!"

"I don't mean the Epistles. Those you can't understand--yet."

"I'm glad you don't mean _them._ I hate them."

"I don't wonder. You have never seen a single shine of what they
are; and what most people think them is hardly the least like
them. What I want you to read is the life and death of the son of
man, the master of men."

"I can't read. I should only make myself twice as ill. I won't
try."

"But I will read to you, if you will let me."

"How comes it you are such a theologian? A woman is not expected
to know about that sort of thing."

"I am no theologian. There just comes one of the cases in which
those who call themselves his followers do not believe what the
Master said: he said God hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and revealed them to babes. I had a father who was child
enough to know them, and I was child enough to believe him, and
so grew able to understand them for myself. The whole secret is
to do the thing the Master tells you: then you will understand
what he tells you. The opinion of the wisest man, if he does not
do the things he reads, is not worth a rush. He may be partly
right, but you have no reason to trust him."

"Well, you shall be my chaplain. To-morrow, if I'm able to
listen, you shall see what you can make of the old sinner."

Mary did not waste words: where would have been the use of
pulling up the poor spiritual clodpole at every lumbering step,
at any word inconsistent with the holy manners of the high
countries? Once get him to court, and the power of the presence
would subdue him, and make him over again from the beginning,
without which absolute renewal the best observance of religious
etiquette is worse than worthless. Many good people are such
sticklers for the proprieties! For myself, I take joyous refuge
with the grand, simple, every-day humanity of the man I find in
the story--the man with the heart like that of my father and my
mother and my brothers and sisters. If I may but see and help to
show him a little as he lived to show himself, and not as church
talk and church ways and church ceremonies and church theories
and church plans of salvation and church worldliness generally
have obscured him for hundreds of years, and will yet obscure him
for hundreds more!

Toward evening, when she had just rendered him one of the many
attentions he required, and which there was no one that day but
herself to render, for he would scarcely allow Mewks to enter the
room, he said to her:

"Thank you; you are very good to me. I shall remember you. Not
that I think I'm going to die just yet; I've often been as bad as
this, and got quite well again. Besides, I want to show that I
have turned over a new leaf. Don't you think God will give me one
more chance, now that I really mean it? I never did before."

"God can tell whether you mean it without that," she answered,
not daring to encourage him where she knew nothing. "But you said
you would remember me, Mr. Redmain: I hope you didn't mean in
your will."

"I did mean in my will," he answered, but in a tone of
displeasure. "I must say, however, I should have preferred you
had not _shown_ quite such an anxiety about it. I sha'n't be
in my coffin to-morrow; and I'm not in the way of forgetting
things."

"I _beg_ you," returned Mary, flushing, "to do nothing of
the sort. I have plenty of money, and don't care about more. I
would much rather not have any from you."

"But think how much good you might do with it!" said Mr. Redmain,
satirically. "--It was come by honestly--so far as I know."

"Money can't do half the good people think. It is stubborn stuff
to turn to any good. And in this case it would be directly
against good."

"Nobody has a right to refuse what comes honestly in his way.
There's no end to the good that may be done with money--to judge,
at least, by the harm I've done with mine," said Mr. Redmain,
this time with seriousness.

"It is not in it," persisted Mary. "If it had been, our Lord
would have used it, and he never did."

"Oh, but he was all an exception!"

"On the contrary, he is the only man who is no exception. We are
the exceptions. Every one but him is more or less out of the
straight. Do you not see?--he is the very one we must all come to
be the same as, or perish! No, Mr. Redmain! don't leave me any
money, or I shall be altogether bewildered what to do with it.
Mrs. Redmain would not take it from me. Miss Yolland might, but I
dared not give it to her. And for societies, I have small faith
in them."

"Well, well! I'll think about it," said Mr. Redmain, who had now
got so far on the way of life as to be capable of believing that
when Mary said a thing she meant it, though he was quite
incapable of understanding the true relations of money. Few
indeed are the Christians capable of that! The most of them are
just where Peter was, when, the moment after the Lord had honored
him as the first to recognize him as the Messiah, he took upon
him to object altogether to his Master's way of working salvation
in the earth. The Roman emperors took up Peter's plan, and the
devil has been in the church ever since--Peter's Satan, whom the
Master told to get behind him. They are poor prophets, and no
martyrs, who honor money as an element of any importance in the
salvation of the world. Hunger itself does incomparably more to
make Christ's kingdom come than ever money did, or ever will do
while time lasts. Of course money has its part, for everything
has; and whoever has money is bound to use it as best he knows;
but his best is generally an attempt to do saint-work by devil-
proxy.

"I can't think where on earth-you got such a sackful of
extravagant notions!" Mr. Redmain added.

"I told you before, sir, I had a father who set me thinking!"
answered Mary.

"I wish I had had a father like yours," he rejoined.

"There are not many such to be had."

"I fear mine wasn't just what he ought to be, though he can't
have been such a rascal as his son: he hadn't time; he had his
money to make."

"He had the temptation to make it, and you have the temptation to
spend it: which is the more dangerous, I don't know. Each has led
to many crimes."

"Oh, as to crimes--I don't know about that! It depends on what
you call crimes."

"It doesn't matter whether men call a deed a crime or a fault;
the thing is how God regards it, for that is the only truth about
it. What the world thinks, goes for nothing, because it is never
right. It would be worse in me to do some things the world counts
perfectly honorable, than it would be for this man to commit a
burglary, or that a murder. I mean my guilt might be greater in
committing a respectable sin, than theirs in committing a
disreputable one."

Had Mary known anything of science, she might have said that, in
morals as in chemistry, the qualitative analysis is easy, but the
quantitative another affair.

The latter part of this conversation, Sepia listening heard, and
misunderstood utterly.

All the rest of the day Mary was with Mr. Redmain, mostly by his
bedside, sitting in silent watchfulness when he was unable to
talk with her. Nobody entered the room except Mewks, who, when he
did, seemed to watch everything, and try to hear everything, and
once Lady Margaret. When she saw Mary seated by the bed, though
she must have known well enough she was there, she drew herself
up with grand English repellence, and looked scandalized. Mary
rose, and was about to retire. But Mr. Redmain motioned her to
sit still.

"This is my spiritual adviser, Lady Margaret," he said.

Her ladyship cast a second look on Mary, such as few but her
could cast, and left the room.

On into the gloom of the evening Mary sat. No one brought her
anything to eat or drink, and Mr. Redmain was too much taken up
with himself, soul and body, to think of her. She was now past
hunger, and growing faint, when, through the settled darkness,
the words came to her from the bed:

"I should like to have you near me when I am dying, Mary."

The voice was a softer than she had yet heard from Mr. Redmain,
and its tone went to her heart.

"I will certainly be with you, if God please," she answered.

"There is no fear of God," returned Mr. Redmain; "it's the devil
will try to keep you away. But never you heed what any one may do
or say to prevent you. Do your very best to be with me. By that
time I may not be having my own way any more. Be sure, the first
moment they can get the better of me, they will. And you mustn't
place confidence in a single soul in this house. I don't say my
wife would play me false so long as I was able to swear at her,
but I wouldn't trust her one moment longer. You come and be with
me in spite of the whole posse of them." "I will try, Mr.
Redmain," she answered, faintly. "But indeed you must let me go
now, else I may be unable to come to-morrow."

"What's the matter?" he asked hurriedly, half lifting his head
with a look of alarm. "There's no knowing," he went on, muttering
to himself, "what may happen in this cursed house."

"Nothing," replied Mary, "but that I have not had anything to eat
since I left home. I feel rather faint."

"They've given you nothing to eat!" cried Mr. Redmain, but in a
tone that seemed rather of satisfaction than displeasure. "Ring--
no, don't."

"Indeed, I would rather not have anything now till I get home,"
said Mary. "I don't feel inclined to eat where I am not welcome."

"Right! right! right!" said Mr. Redmain. "Stick to that. Never
eat where you are not welcome. Go home directly. Only say when
you will come to-morrow."

"I can't very well during the day," answered Mary. "There is so
much to be done, and I have so little help. But, if you should
want me, I would rather shut up the shop than not come."

"There is no need for that! Indeed, I would much rather have you
in the evening. The first of the night is worst of all. It's then
the devils are out.--Look here," he added, after a short pause,
during which Mary, for as unfit as she felt, hesitated to leave
him, "--being in business, you've got a lawyer, I suppose?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Then you go to him to-night the first thing, and tell him to
come to me to-morrow, about noon. Tell him I am ill, and in bed,
and particularly want to see him; and he mustn't let anything
they say keep him from me, not even if they tell him I am dead."

"I will," said Mary, and, stroking the thin hand that lay outside
the counterpane, turned and left him.

"Don't tell any one you are gone," he called after her, with a
voice far from feeble. "I don't want any of their damned
company."




CHAPTER LIII.

A FRIEND IN NEED.


Mary left the house, and saw no one on her way. But it was
better, she said to herself, that he should lie there untended,
than be waited on by unloving hands.

The night was very dark. There was no moon, and the stars were
hidden by thick clouds. She must walk all the way to Testbridge.
She felt weak, but the fresh air was reviving. She did not know
the way so familiarly as that between Thornwick and the town, but
she would enter the latter before arriving at the common.

She had not gone far when the moon rose, and from behind the
clouds diminished the darkness a little. The first part of her
journey lay along a narrow lane, with a small ditch, a rising
bank, and a hedge on each side. About the middle of the lane was
a farmyard, and a little way farther a cottage. Soon after
passing the gate of the farmyard, she thought she heard steps
behind her, seemingly soft and swift, and naturally felt a little
apprehension; but her thoughts flew to the one hiding-place for
thoughts and hearts and lives, and she felt no terror. At the
same time something moved her to quicken her pace. As she drew
near the common, she heard the steps more plainly, still soft and
swift, and almost wished she had sought refuge in the cottage she
had just passed--only it bore no very good character in the
neighborhood. When she reached the spot where the paths united,
feeling a little at home, she stopped to listen. Behind her were
the footsteps plain enough! The same moment the clouds thinned
about the moon, and a pale light came filtering through upon the
common in front of her. She cast one look over her shoulder, saw
something turn a corner in the lane, and sped on again. She would
have run, but there was no place of refuge now nearer than the
corner of the turnpike-road, and she knew her breath would fail
her long before that. How lonely and shelterless the common
looked! The soft, swift steps came nearer and nearer.

Was that music she heard? She dared not stop to listen. But
immediately, thereupon, was poured forth on the dim air such a
stream of pearly sounds as if all the necklaces of some heavenly
choir of woman-angels were broken, and the beads came pelting
down in a cataract of hurtless hail. From no source could they
come save the bow and violin of Joseph Jasper! Where could he be?
She was so rejoiced to know that he must be somewhere near, that,
for very delight of unsecured safety, she held her peace, and had
almost stopped. But she ran on again. She was now nigh the ruined
hut with which my narrative has made the reader acquainted. In
the mean time the moon had been growing out of the clouds,
clearer and clearer. The hut came in sight. But the look of it
was somehow altered--with an undefinable change, such as might
appear on a familiar object in a dream; and leaning against the
side of the door stood a figure she could not mistake for another
than her musician. Absorbed in his music, he did not see her. She
called out, "Joseph! Joseph!" He started, threw his bow from him,
tucked his violin under his arm, and bounded to meet her. She
tried to stop, and the same moment to look behind her. The
consequence was that she fell--but safe in the smith's arms. That
instant appeared a man running. He half stopped, and, turning
from the path, took to the common. Jasper handed his violin to
Mary, and darted after him. The chase did not last a minute; the
man was nearly spent. Joseph seized him by the wrist, saw
something glitter in his other hand, and turned sick. The fellow
had stabbed him. With indignation, as if it were a snake that had
bit him, the blacksmith flung from him the hand he held. The man
gave a cry, staggered, recovered himself, and ran. Joseph would
have followed again, but fell, and for a minute or two lost
consciousness. When he came to himself, Mary was binding up his
arm.

"What a fool I am!" he said, trying to get up, but yielding at
once to Mary's prevention. "Ain't it ridic'lous now, miss, that a
man of my size, and ready to work a sledge with any smith in
Yorkshire, should turn sick for a little bit of a job with a
knife? But my father was just the same, and he was a stronger man
than I'm like to be, I fancy."

"It is no such wonder as you think," said Mary; "you have lost a
good deal of blood."

Her voice faltered. She had been greatly alarmed--and the more
that she had not light enough to get the edges of the wound
properly together.

"You've stopped it--ain't you, miss?"

"I think so."

"Then I'll be after the fellow."

"No, no; you must not attempt it. You must lie still awhile. But
I don't understand it at all! That cottage used to be a mere
hovel, without door or window! It can't be you live in it?"

"Ay, that I do! and it's not a bad place either," answered
Joseph. "That's what I went to Yorkshire to get my money for.
It's mine--bought and paid for."

"But what made you think of coming here?"

"Let's go into the smithy--house I won't presume to call it,"
said Joseph, "though it has a lean-to for the smith--and I'll
tell you everything about it. But really, miss, you oughtn't to
be out like this after dark. There's too many vagabonds about."

With but little need of the help Mary yet gave him, Joseph got
up, and led her to what was now a respectable little smithy, with
forge and bellows and anvil and bucket. Opening a door where had
been none, he brought a chair, and making her sit down, began to
blow the covered fire on the hearth, where he had not long before
"boiled his kettle" for his tea. Then closing the door, he
lighted a candle, and Mary looking about her could scarcely
believe the change that had come upon the miserable vacuity.
Joseph sat down upon his anvil, and begged to know where she had
just been, and how far she had run from the rascal. When he had
learned something of the peculiar relations in which Mary stood
to the family at Durnmelling, he began to think there might have
been something more in the pursuit than a chance ruffianly
assault, and the greater were his regrets that he had not secured
the miscreant.

"Anyhow, miss," he said, "you'll never come from there alone in
the dark again!"

"I understand you, Joseph," answered Mary, "for I know you would
not have me leave doing what I can for the poor man up there,
because of a little danger in the way."

"No, that I wouldn't, miss. That would be as much as to say you
would do the will of God when the devil would let you. What I
mean is, that here am I--your slave, or servant, or soldier, or
whatever you may please to call me, ready at your word."

"I must not take you from your work, you know, Joseph."

"Work's not everything, miss," he answered; "and it's seldom so
pressing but that--except I be shoeing a horse--I can leave it
when I choose. Any time you want to go anywhere, don't forget as
you've got enemies about, and just send for me. You won't have
long to wait till I come. But I am main sorry the rascal didn't
have something to keep him in mind of his manners."

Part of this conversation, and a good deal more, passed on their
way to Testbridge, whither, as soon as Joseph seemed all right,
Mary, who had forgotten her hunger and faintness, insisted on
setting out at once. In her turn she questioned Joseph, and
learned that, as soon as he knew she was going to settle at
Testbridge, he started off to find if possible a place in the
neighborhood humble enough to be within his reach, and near
enough for the hope of seeing her sometimes, and having what help
she might please to give him. The explanation afforded Mary more
pleasure than she cared to show. She had a real friend near her--
one ready to help her on her own ground--one who understood her
because he understood the things she loved! He told her that
already he had work enough to keep him going; that the horses he
once shod were always brought to him again; that lie was at no
expense such as in a town; and that he had plenty of time both
for his violin and his books.

When they came to the suburbs, she sent him home, and went
straight to Mr. Brett with Mr. Redmain's message. He undertook to
be at Durnmelling at the time appointed, and to let nothing
prevent him from seeing his new client.




CHAPTER LIV.

THE NEXT NIGHT.


Mr. Bratt found no difficulty in the way of the interview, for
Mr. Redmain had given Mewks instructions he dared not disobey:
his master had often ailed, and recovered again, and he must not
venture too far! As soon as he had shown the visitor into the
room he was dismissed, but not before he had satisfied himself
that he was a lawyer. He carried the news at once to Sepia, and
it wrought no little anxiety in the house. There was a will
already in existence, and no ground for thinking a change in it
boded anything good. Mr. Mortimer never deigned to share his
thoughts, anxieties, or hopes with any of his people; but the
ladies met in deep consultation, although of course there was
nothing to be done. The only operative result was that it let
Sepia know how, though for reasons somewhat different, her
anxiety was shared by the others: unlike theirs, her sole desire
was--_not_ to be mentioned in the will: that could only be
for the sake of leaving her a substantial curse! Mr. Redmain's
utter silence, after, as she well knew, having gathered damning
facts to her discredit, had long convinced her he was but biding
his time. Certain she was he would not depart this life without
leaving his opinion of her and the proofs of its justice behind
him, carrying weight as the affidavit of a dying man. Also she
knew Hesper well enough to be certain that, however she might
delight in oppostion to the desire of her husband, she would for
the sake of no one carry that opposition to a point where it
became injurious to her interests. Sepia's one thought therefore
was: could not something be done to prevent the making of another
will, or the leaving of any fresh document behind him? What he
might already have done, she could nowise help; what he might yet
do, it would be well to prevent. Once more, therefore, she
impressed upon Mewks, and that in the names of Mrs. Redmain and
Lady Margaret, as well as in her own person, the absolute
necessity of learning as much as possible of what might pass
between his master and the lawyer.

Mewks was driven to the end of his wits, and they were not a few,
to find excuses for going into the room, and for delaying to go
out again, while with all his ears he listened. But both client
and lawyer were almost too careful for him; and he had learned
positively nothing when the latter rose to depart. He instantly
left the room, with the door a trifle ajar, and listening
intently, heard his master say that Mr. Brett must come again the
next morning; that he felt better, and would think over the
suggestions he had made; and that he must leave the memoranda
within his reach, on the table by his bedside. Ere the lawyer
issued, Mewks was on his way with all this to his tempter.

Sepia concluded there had been some difference of opinion between
Mr. Redmain and his adviser, and hoped that nothing had been
finally settled. Was there any way to prevent the lawyer from
seeing him again? Could she by any means get a peep at the
memoranda mentioned? She dared not suggest the thing to Hesper or
Lady Malice--of all people they were those in relation to whom
she feared their possible contents--and she dared not show
herself in Mr. Redmain's room. Was Mewks to be trusted to the
point of such danger as grew in her thought?

The day wore on. Toward evening he had a dreadful attack. Any
other man would have sent before now for what medical assistance
the town could afford him, but Mr. Redmain hated having a
stranger about him, and, as he knew how to treat himself, it was
only when very ill that he would send for his own doctor to the
country, fearing that otherwise he might give him up as a
patient, such visits, however well remunerated, being seriously
inconvenient to a man with a large London practice. But now Lady
Margaret took upon herself to send a telegram.

An hour before her usual time for closing the shop, Mary set out
for Durnmelling; and, at the appointed spot on the way, found her
squire of low degree in waiting. At first sight, however, and
although she was looking out for him, she did not certainly
recognize him. I would not have my reader imagine Joseph one of
those fools who delight in appearing something else than they
are; but while every workman ought to look a workman, it ought
not to be by looking less of a man, or of a _gentleman_ in
the true sense; and Joseph, having, out of respect to her who
would honor him with her company, dressed himself in a new suit
of unpretending gray, with a wide-awake hat, looked at first
sight more like a country gentleman having a stroll over his
farm, than a man whose hands were hard with the labors of the
forge. He took off his hat as she approached--if not with ease,
yet with the clumsy grace peculiar to him; for, unlike many whose
manners are unobjectionable, he had in his something that might
be called his own. But the best of it was, that he knew nothing
about his manners, beyond the desire to give honor where honor
was due.

He walked with her to the door of the house; for they had agreed
that, from whatever quarter had come the pursuit, and whatever
might have been its object, it would be well to show that she was
attended. They had also arranged at what hour, and at what spot
close at hand, he was to be waiting to accompany her home. But,
although he said nothing about it, Joseph was determined not to
leave the place until she rejoined him.

It was nearly dark when he left her; and when he had wandered up
and down the avenue awhile, it seemed dark enough to return to
the house, and reconnoiter a little.

He had already made the acquaintance of the farmer who occupied a
portion of the great square, behind the part where the family
lived: he had had several of his horses to shoe, and had not only
given satisfaction by the way in which he shod them, but had
interested their owner with descriptions of more than one rare
mode of shoeing to which he had given attention; he was,
therefore, the less shy of being discovered about the place.

From the back he found his way into the roofless hall, and there
paced quietly up and down, measuring the floor, and guessing at
the height and thickness of the walls, and the sort of roof they
had borne. He noted that the wall of the house rose higher than
those of the ruin with which it was in contact; and that there
was a window in it just over one of those walls. Thinking whether
it had been there when the roof was on, he saw through it the
flickering of a fire, and wondered whether it could be the window
of Mr. Redmain's room.

Mary, having resolved not to give any notice of her arrival, if
she could get in without it, and finding the hall-door on the
latch, entered quietly, and walked straight to Mr. Redmain's
bedroom. When she opened the door of it, Mewks came hurriedly to
meet her, as if he would have made her go out again, but she
scarcely looked at him, and advanced to the bed. Mr. Redmain was
just waking from the sleep into which he had fallen after a
severe paroxysm.

"Ah, there you are!" he said, smiling her a feeble welcome. "I am
glad you are come. I have been looking out for you. I am very
ill. If it comes again to-night, I think it will make an end of
me."

She sat down by the bedside. He lay quite still for some time,
breathing like one very weary. Then he seemed to grow easier, and
said, with much gentleness:

"Can't you talk to me?"

"Would you like me to read to you?" she asked.

"No," he answered; "I can't bear the light; it makes my head
furious."

"Shall I talk to you about my father?" she asked.

"I don't believe in fathers," he replied. "They're always after
some notion of their own. It's not their children they care
about."

"That may be true of some fathers," answered Mary; "but it is not
the least true of mine."

"Where is he? Why don't you bring him to see me, if he is such a
good man? He might be able to do something for me."

"There is none but your own father can do anything for you," said
Mary. "My father is gone home to him, but if he were here, he
would only tell you about _him_."

There was a moment's silence.

"Why don't you talk?" said Mr. Redmain, crossly. "What's the good
of sitting there saying nothing! How am I to forget that the pain
will be here again, if you don't say a word to help me?"

Mary lifted up her heart, and prayed for something to say to the
sad human soul that had never known the Father. But she could
think of nothing to talk about except the death of William
Marston. So she began with the dropping of her watch, and,
telling whatever seemed at the moment fit to tell, ended with the
dream she had the night of his funeral. By that time the hidden
fountain was flowing in her soul, and she was able to speak
straight out of it.

"I can not tell you, sir," she said, closing the story of her
dream, "what a feeling it was! The joy of it was beyond all
expression."

"You're not surely going to offer me a dream in proof of
anything!" muttered the sick man.

"Yes," answered Mary--"in proof of what it can prove. The joy of
a child over a new toy, or a colored sweetmeat, shows of what
bliss the human soul is made capable."

"Oh, capable, I dare say!"

"And more than that," Mary went on, adding instead of replying,
"no one ever felt such gladness without believing in it. There
must be somewhere the justification of such gladness. There must
be the father of it somewhere."

"Well! I don't like to say, after your kindness in coming here to
take care of me, that you talk the worst rubbish I ever heard;
but just tell me of what use is it all to me, in the state I am
in! What I want is to be free of pain, and have some pleasure in
life--not to be told about a father."

"But what if the father you don't want is determined you shall
not have what you do want? What if your desire is not worth
keeping you alive for? And what if he is ready to help your
smallest effort to be the thing he wants you to be--and in the
end to give you your heart's desire?"

"It sounds very fine, but it's all so thin, so up in the clouds!
It don't seem to have a leg to stand upon. Why, if that were
true, everybody would be good! There would be none but saints in
the world! What's in it, I'm sure I don't know."

"It will take ages to know what is in it; but, if you should die
now, you will be glad to find, on the other side, that you have
made a beginning. For my part, if I had everything my soul could
desire, except God with me, I could but pray that he would come
to me, or not let me live a moment longer; for it would be but
the life of a devil."

"What do you mean by a devil?"

"A power that lives against its life," said Mary.

Mr. Redmain answered nothing. He did not perceive an atom of
sense in the words. They gave him not a glimmer. Neither will
they to many of my readers; while not a few will think they see
all that is in them, and see nothing.

He was silent for a long time--whether he waked or slept she
could not tell.

The annoyance was great in the home conclave when Mewks brought
the next piece of news--namely, that there was that designing
Marston in the master's room again, and however she got into the
house he was sure _he_ didn't know.

"All the same thing over again, miss!--hard at it a-tryin' to
convert 'im!--And where's the use, you know, miss? If a man like
my master's to be converted and get off, I don't for my part see
where's the good o' keepin' up a devil."

"I am quite of your opinion, Mewks," said Sepia.

But in her heart she was ill at ease.

All day long she had been haunted with an ever-recurring
temptation, which, instead of dismissing it, she kept like a dog
in a string. Different kinds of evil affect people differently.
Ten thousand will do a dishonest thing, who would indignantly
reject the dishonest thing favored by another ten thousand. They
are not sufficiently used to its ugly face not to dislike it,
though it may not be quite so ugly as their _protege_. A man
will feel grandly honest against the dishonesties of another
trade than his, and be eager to justify those of his own. Here
was Sepia, who did not care the dust of a butterfly's wing for
causing any amount of family misery, who would without a pang
have sacrificed the genuine reputation of an innocent man to save
her own false one--shuddering at an idea as yet bodiless in her
brain--an idea which, however, she did not dismiss, and so grew
able to endure!

I have kept this woman--so far as personal acquaintance with her
is concerned--in the background of my history. For one thing, I
am not fond of _post-mortem_ examinations; in other words, I
do not like searching the decompositions of moral carrion.
Analysis of such is, like the use of reagents on dirt, at least
unpleasant. Nor was any true end to be furthered by a more vivid
presentation of her. Nosology is a science doomed, thank God, to
perish! Health alone will at last fill the earth. Or, if there
should be always the ailing to help, a man will help them by
being sound himself, not by knowing the ins and outs of disease.
Diagnosis is not therapy.

Sepia was unnatural--as every one is unnatural who does not set
his face in the direction of the true Nature; but she had gone
further in the opposite direction than many people have yet
reached. At the same time, whoever has not faced about is on the
way to a capacity for worse things than even our enemies would
believe of us.

Her very existence seemed to her now at stake. If by his dying
act Mr. Redmain should drive her from under Hesper's roof, what
was to become of her! Durnmelling, too, would then be as
certainly closed against her, and she would be compelled to take
a situation, and teach music, which she hated, and French and
German, which gave her no pleasure apart from certain strata of
their literature, to insolent girls whom she would be constantly
wishing to strangle, or stupid little boys who would bore her to
death. Her very soul sickened at the thought--as well it might;
for to have to do such service with such a heart as hers, must
indeed be torment. All hope of marrying Godfrey Wardour would be
gone, of course. Did he but remain uncertain as to the truth or
falsehood of a third part of what Mr. Redmain would record
against her, he would never meet her again!

Since the commencement of this last attack of Mr. Redmain's
malady, she had scarcely slept; and now what Mewks reported
rendered her nigh crazy. For some time she had been generally
awake half the night, and all the last night she had been
wandering here and there about the house, not unfrequently
couched where she could hear every motion in Mr. Redmain's room.
Haunted by fear, she in turn haunted her fear. She could not keep
from staring down the throat of the pit. She was a slave of the
morrow, the undefined, awful morrow, ever about to bring forth no
one knows what. That morrow could she but forestall!

If any should think that anxiety and watching must have so
wrought on Sepia that she came to be no longer accountable for
her actions, I will not oppose the kind conclusion. For my own
part, until I shall have seen a man absolutely one with the
source of his being, I do not believe I shall ever have seen a
man absolutely sane. What many would point to as plainest proofs
of sanity, I should regard as surest signs of the contrary.

A sign of my own insanity is it?

Your insanity may be worse than mine, for you are aware of none,
and I with mine do battle. I believe all insanity has moral as
well as physical roots. But enough of this. There are questions
we can afford to leave.

Sepia had got very thin during these trying days. Her great eyes
were larger yet, and filled with a troubled anxiety. Not
paleness, for of that her complexion was incapable, but a dull
pallor possessed her cheek. If one had met her as she roamed the
house that night, he might well have taken her for some naughty
ancestor, whose troubled conscience, not yet able to shake off
the madness of some evil deed, made her wander still about the
place where she had committed it.

She believed in no supreme power who cares that right should be
done in his worlds. Here, it may be, some of my unbelieving
acquaintances, foreseeing a lurid something on the horizon of my
story, will be indignant that the capacity for crime should be
thus associated with the denial of a Live Good. But it remains a
mere fact that it is easier for a man to commit a crime when he
does not fear a willed retribution. Tell me there is no merit in
being prevented by fear; I answer, the talk is not of merit. As
the world is, that is, as the race of men at present is, it is
just as well that the man who has no merit, and never dreamed of
any, should yet be a little hindered from cutting his neighbor's
throat at his evil pleasure.--No; I do not mean hindered by a
lie--I mean hindered by the poorest apprehension of the grandest
truth.

Of those who do not believe, some have never had a noble picture
of God presented to them; but whether their phantasm is of a mean
God because they refuse him, or they refuse him because their
phantasm of him is mean, who can tell? Anyhow, mean notions must
come of meanness, and, uncharitable as it may appear, I can not
but think there is a moral root to all chosen unbelief. But let
God himself judge his own.

With Sepia, what was _best_ meant what was best for her, and
_best for her_ meant _most after her liking_.

She had in her time heard a good deal about _euthanasia_,
and had taken her share in advocating it. I do not assume this to
be anything additional against her; one who does not believe in
God, may in such an advocacy indulge a humanity pitiful over the
irremediable ills of the race; and, being what she was, she was
no worse necessarily for advocating that than for advocating
cremation, which she did--occasionally, I must confess, a little
coarsely. But the notion of _euthanasia_ might well work for
evil in a mind that had not a thought for the case any more than
for the betterment of humanity, or indeed for anything but its
own consciousness of pleasure or comfort. Opinions, like drugs,
work differently on different constitutions. Hence the man is
foolish who goes scattering vague notions regardless of the soil
on which they may fall.

She was used to asking the question, What's the good? but always
in respect of something she wanted out of her way.

"What's the good of an hour or two more if you're not enjoying
it?" she said to herself again and again that Monday. "What's the
good of living when life is pain--or fear of death, from which no
fear can save you?" But the question had no reference to her own
life: she was judging for another--and for another not for his
sake, or from his point of view, but for her own sake, and from
where she stood.

All the day she wandered about the house, such thoughts as these
in her heart, and in her pocket a bottle of that concentrated
which Mr. Redmain was taking much diluted for medicine. But she
_hoped not to have to use it_. If only Mr. Redmain would
yield the conflict, and depart without another interview with the
lawyer!

But if he would not, and two drops from the said bottle, not
taken by herself, but by another, would save her, all her life to
come, from endless anxiety and grinding care, from weariness and
disgust, and indeed from want; nor that alone, but save likewise
that other from an hour, or two hours, or perhaps a week, or
possibly two weeks, or--who could tell?--it might be a month of
pain and moaning and weariness, would it not be well?--must it
not be more than well?

She had not learned to fear temptation; she feared poverty,
dependence, humiliation, labor, _ennui_, misery. The thought
of the life that must follow and wrap her round in the case of
the dreaded disclosure was unendurable; the thought of the
suggested frustration was not _so_ unendurable--was not
absolutely unendurable--was to be borne--might be permitted to
come--to return--was cogitated--now with imagined resistance, now
with reluctant and partial acceptance, now with faint resolve,
and now with determined resolution--now with the beaded drops
pouring from the forehead, and now with a cold, scornful smile of
triumphant foil and success.

Was she so very exceptionally bad, however? You who hate your
brother or your sister--you do not think yourself at all bad! But
you are a murderer, and she was only a murderer. You do not feel
wicked? How do you know she did? Besides, you hate, and she did
not hate; she only wanted to take care of herself. Lady Macbeth
did not hate Duncan; she only wanted to give her husband his
crown. You only hate your brother; you would not, you say, do him
any harm; and I believe you would not do him mere bodily harm;
but, were things changed, so that hate-action became absolutely
safe, I should have no confidence what you might not come to do.
No one can tell what wreck a gust of passion upon a sea of hate
may work. There are men a man might well kill, if he were
anything less than ready to die for them. The difference between
the man that hates and the man that kills may be nowhere but in
the courage. These are _grewsome_ thinkings: let us leave
them--but hating with them.

All the afternoon Sepia hovered about Mr. Rcdmain's door, down
upon Mewks every moment he appeared. Her head ached; she could
hardly breathe. Rest she could not. Once when Mewks, coming from
the room, told her his master was asleep, she crept in, and,
softly approaching the head of the bed, looked at him from
behind, then stole out again.

"He seems dying, Mewks," she said.

"Oh, no, miss! I've often seen him as bad. He's better."

"Who's that whispering?" murmured the patient, angrily, though
half asleep.

Mewks went in, and answered:

"Only me and Jemima, sir."

"Where's Miss Marston?"

"She's not come yet, sir."

"I want to go to sleep again. You must wake me the moment she
comes."

"Yes, sir."

Mewks went back to Sepia.

"His voice is much altered," she said.

"He most always speaks like that now, miss, when he wakes--very
different from I used to know him! He'd always swear bad when he
woke; but Miss Marston do seem t' 'ave got a good deal of that
out of him. Anyhow, this last two days he's scarce swore enough
to make it feel home-like."

"It's death has got it out of him," said Sepia. "I don't think he
can last the night through. Fetch me at once if--And don't let
that Marston into the room again, whatever you do."

She spoke with the utmost emphasis, plainly clinching
instructions previously given, then went slowly up the stair to
her own room. Surely he would die to-night, and she would not be
led into temptation! She would then have but to get a hold of the
paper! What a hateful and unjust thing it was that her life
should be in the power of that man--a miserable creature, himself
hanging between life and death!--that such as he should be able
to determine her fate, and say whether she was to be comfortable
or miserable all the rest of a life that was to outlast his so
many years! It was absurd to talk of a Providence! She must be
her own providence!

She stole again down the stair. Her cousin was in her own room
safe with a novel, and there was Mewks fast asleep in an easy-
chair in the study, with the doors of the dressing-room and
chamber ajar! She crept into the sick-room. There was the tumbler
with the medicine! and her fingers were on the vial in her
pocket. The dying man slept.

She drew near the table by the bed. He stirred as if about to
awake. Her limbs, her brain seemed to rebel against her will.--
But what folly it was! the man was not for this world a day
longer; what could it matter whether he left it a few hours
earlier or later? The drops on his brow rose from the pit of his
agony; every breath was a torture; it were mercy to help him
across the verge; if to more life, he would owe her thanks; if to
endless rest, he would never accuse her.

She took the vial from her pocket. A hand was on the lock of the
door! She turned and fled through the dressing-room and study,
waking Mewks as she passed. He, hurrying into the chamber, saw
Mary already entered.

When Sepia learned who it was that had scared her, she felt she
could kill her with less compunction than Mr. Redmain. She hated
her far worse.

"You _must_ get the viper out of-the house, Mewks," she
said. "It is all your fault she got into the room."

"I'm sure I'm willing enough," he answered, "--even if it wasn't
you as as't me, miss! But what am I to do? She's that brazen, you
wouldn' believe, miss! It wouldn' be becomin' to tell you what I
think that young woman fit to do."

"I don't doubt it," responded Sepia. "But surely," she went on,
"the next time he has an attack, and he's certain to have one
soon, you will be able to get her hustled out!"

"No, miss--least of all just then. She'll make that a pretense
for not going a yard from the bed--as if me that's been about him
so many years didn't know what ought to be done with him in his
paroxes of pain better than the likes of her! Of all things I do
loathe a row, miss--and the talk of it after; and sure I am that
without a row we don't get her out of that room. The only way is
to be quiet, and seem to trust her, and watch for the chance of
her going out--then shut her out, and keep her out."

"I believe you are right," returned Sepia, almost with a hope
that no such opportunity might arrive, but at the same time
growing more determined to take advantage of it if it should.

Hence partly it came that Mary met with no interruption to her
watching and ministering. Mewks kept coming and going--watching
her, and awaiting his opportunity. Mr. Redmain scarcely heeded
him, only once and again saying in sudden anger, "What can that
idiot be about? He might know by this time I'm not likely to want
_him_ so long as _you_ are in the room!"

And said Mary to herself: "Who knows what good the mere presence
of one who trusts may be to him, even if he shouldn't seem to
take much of what she says! Perhaps he may think of some of it
after he is dead--who knows?" Patiently she sat and waited, full
of help that would have flowed in a torrent, but which she felt
only trickle from her heart like a stream that is lost on the
face of the rock down which it flows.

All at once she bethought herself, and looked at her watch:
Joseph had been waiting for her more than an hour, and would not,
she knew, if he stopped all night, go away without her! And for
her, she could not forsake the poor man her presence seemed to
comfort! He was now lying very still: she would slip out and send
Joseph away, and be back before the patient or any one else
should miss her!

She went softly from the room, and glided down the stairs, and
out of the house, seeing no one--but not unseen: hardly was she
from the room, when the door of it was closed and locked behind
her, and hardly from the house, when the house-door also was
closed and locked behind her. But she heard nothing, and ran,
without the least foreboding of mishap, to the corner where
Joseph was to meet her.

There he was, waiting as patiently as if the hour had not yet
come.

"I can't leave him, Joseph. My heart won't let me," she said. "I
can not go back before the morning. I will look in upon you as I
pass."

So saying, and without giving him time to answer, she bade him
good night, and ran back to the house, hoping to get in as before
without being seen. But to her dismay she found the door already
fast, and concluded the hour had arrived when the house was shut
up for the night. She rang the bell, but there was no answer--for
there was Mewks himself standing close behind the door, grinning
like his master an evil grin. As she knocked and rang in vain,
the fact flashed upon her that she was intentionally excluded.
She turned away, overwhelmed with a momentary despair. What was
she to do? There stood Joseph! She ran back to him, and told him
they had shut her out.

"It makes me miserable," she went on, "to think of the poor man
calling me, and me nowhere to answer. The worst of it is, I seem
the only person he has any faith in, and what I have been telling
him about the father of us all, whose love never changes, will
seem only the idler tale, when he finds I am gone, and nowhere to
be found--as they're sure to tell him. There's no saying what
lies they mayn't tell him about my going! Rather than go, I will
sit on the door-step all night, just to be able to tell him in
the morning that I never went home."

"Why have they done it, do you think? asked Joseph.

"I dare hardly allow myself to conjecture," answered Mary. "None
of them like me but Jemima--not even Mrs. Redmain now, I am
afraid; for you see I never got any of the good done her I
wanted, and, till something of that was done, she could not know
how I felt toward her. I shouldn't a bit wonder if they fancy I
have a design on his money--as if anybody fit to call herself a
woman would condescend to such a thing! But when a woman would
marry for money, she may well think as badly of another woman."

"This is a serious affair," said Joseph. "To have a dying man
believe you false to him would be dreadful! We must find some way
in. Let us go to the kitchen-door."

"If Jemima happened to be near, then, perhaps!" rejoined Mary;
"but if they want to keep me out, you may be sure Mewks has taken
care of one door as well as another. He knows I'm not so easy to
keep out."

"If you did get in," said Joseph, speaking in a whisper as they
went, "would you feel quite safe after this?"

"I have no fear. I dare say they would lock me up somewhere if
they could, before I got to Mr. Redmain's room: once in, they
would not dare touch me."

"I shall not go out of hearing so long as you are in that house,"
said Joseph, with decision. "Not until I have you out again do I
leave the premises. If anything should make you feel
uncomfortable, you cry out, miss, and I'll make a noise at the
door that everybody at Thornwick over there shall hear me."

"It is a large house, Joseph: one might call in many a part of
it, and never be heard out of doors. I don't think you could hear
me from Mr. Redmain's room," said Mary, with a little laugh, for
she was amused as well as pleased at the protection Joseph would
give her; "it is up two flights, and he chose it himself for the
sake of being quiet when he was ill."

As she spoke, they reached the door they sought--the most likely
of all to be still open: it was fast and dark as if it had not
been unbolted for years. One or two more entrances they tried,
but with no better success.

"Come this way," whispered Joseph. "I know a place where we shall
at least be out of their sight, and where we can plan at our
leisure."

He led her to the back entrance to the old hall. Alas! even that
was closed.

"This _is_ disappointing," he said; "for, if we were only in
there, I think something might be done."

"I believe I know a way," said Mary, and led him to a place near,
used for a wood-shed.

At the top of a great heap of sticks and fagots was an opening in
the wall, that had once been a window, or perhaps a door.

"That, I know, is the wall of the tower," she said; "and there
can be no difficulty in getting through there. Once in, it will
be easy to reach the hall--that is, if the door of the tower is
not locked."

In an instant Joseph was at the top of the heap, and through the
opening, hanging on, and feeling with his feet. He found footing
at no great distance, and presently Mary was beside him. They
descended softly, and found the door into the hall wide open.

"Can you tell me what window is that," whispered Joseph, "just
above the top of the wall?"

"I can not," answered Mary. "I never could go about this house as
I did about Mr. Redmain's; my lady always looked so fierce if she
saw me trying to understand the place. But why do you ask?"

"You see the flickering of a fire? Could it be Mr. Redmain's
room?"

"I can not tell. I do not think it. That has no window in this
direction, so far as I know. But I could not be certain."

"Think how the stairs turn as you go up, and how the passages go
to the room. Think in what direction you look every corner you
turn. Then you will know better whether or not it might be."

Mary was silent, and thought. In her mind she followed every turn
she had to take from the moment she entered the house till she
got to the door of Mr. Redmain's room, and then thought how the
windows lay when she entered it. Her conclusion was that one side
of the room must be against the hall, but she could remember no
window in it.

"But," she added, "I never was in that room when I was here
before, and, the twice I have now been in it, I was too much
occupied to take much notice of things about me. Two windows, I
know, look down into a quiet little corner of the courtyard,
where there is an old pump covered with ivy. I remember no
other."

"Is there any way of getting on to the top of that wall from this
tower?" asked Joseph.

"Certainly there is. People often walk round the top of those
walls. They are more than thick enough for that."

"Are you able to do it?"

"Yes, quite. I have been round them more than once. But I don't
like the idea of looking in at a window."

"No more do I, miss; but you must remember, if it is his room, it
will only be your eyes going where the whole of you has a right
to be; and, if it should not be that room, they have driven you
to it: such a necessity will justify it."

"You must be right," answered Mary, and, turning, led the way up
the stair of the tower, and through a gap in the wall out upon
the top of the great walls.

It was a sultry night. A storm was brooding between heaven and
earth. The moon was not yet up, and it was so dark that they had
to feel their way along the wall, glad of the protection of a
fence of thick ivy on the outer side. Looking down into the court
on the one hand, and across the hall to the lawn on the other,
they saw no living thing in the light from various windows, and
there was little danger of being discovered. In the gable was
only the one window for which they were making. Mary went first,
as better knowing the path, also as having the better right to
look in. Through the window, as she went, she could see the
flicker, but not the fire. All at once came a great blaze. It
lasted but a moment--long enough, however, to let them see
plainly into a small closet, the door of which was partly open.

"That is the room, I do believe," whispered Mary. "There is a
closet, but I never was in it."

"If only the window be not bolted!" returned Joseph.

The same instant Mary heard the voice of Mr. Redmain call in a
tone of annoyance--"Mary! Mary Marston! I want you. Who is that
in the room?--Damn you! who are you?"

"Let me pass you," said Joseph, and, making her hold to the ivy,
here spread on to the gable, he got between Mary and the window.
The blaze was gone, and the fire was at its old flicker. The
window was not bolted. He lifted the sash. A moment and he was
in. The next, Mary was beside him.

Something, known to her only as an impulse, induced Mary to go
softly to the door of the closet, and peep into the room. She saw
Hesper, as she thought, standing--sidewise to the closet--by a
chest of drawers invisible from the bed. A candle stood on the
farther side of her. She held in one hand the tumbler from which,
repeatedly that evening, Mary had given the patient his medicine:
into this she was pouring, with an appearance of care, something
from a small dark bottle.

With a sudden suspicion of foul play, Mary glided swiftly into
the room, and on to where she stood. It was Sepia! She started
with a smothered shriek, turned white, and almost dropped the
bottle; then, seeing who it was, recovered herself. But such a
look as she cast on Mary! such a fire of hate as throbbed out of
those great black eyes! Mary thought for a moment she would dart
at her. But she turned away, and walked swiftly to the door.
Joseph, however, peeping in behind Mary, had caught a glimpse of
the bottle and tumbler, also of Sepia's face. Seeing her now
retiring with the bottle in her hand, he sprang after her, and,
thanks to the fact that she had locked the door, was in time to
snatch it from her. She turned like a wild beast, and a terrible
oath came hissing as from a feline throat. When, however, she
saw, not Mary, but the unknown figure of a powerful man, she
turned again to the door and fled. Joseph shut and locked it, and
went back to the closet. Mary drew near the bed.

"Where have you been all this time?" asked the patient,
querulously; "and who was that went out of the room just now?
What's all the hurry about?"

Anxious he should be neither frightened nor annoyed, Mary replied
to the first part of his question only.

"I had to go and tell a friend, who was waiting for me, that I
shouldn't be home to-night. But here I am now, and I will not
leave you again."

"How did the door come to be locked? And who was that went out of
the room?"

While he was thus questioning, Joseph crept softly out of the
window; and all the rest of the night he lay on the top of the
wall under it.

"It was Miss Yolland," answered Mary.

"What business had she in my room?"

"She shall not enter it again while I am here."

"Don't let Mewks in either," he rejoined. "I heard the door
unlock and lock again: what did it mean?"

"Wait till to-morrow. Perhaps we shall find out then."

He was silent a little.

"I must get out of this house, Mary," he sighed at length.

"When the doctor comes, we shall see," said Mary.

"What! is the doctor coming? I am glad of that. Who sent for
him?" "I don't know; I only heard he was coming."

"But your lawyer, Mary--what's his name?--will be here first:
we'll talk the thing over with him, and take his advice. I feel
better, and shall go to sleep again."

All night long Mary sat by him and watched. Not a step, so far as
she knew, came near the door; certainly not a hand was laid upon
the lock. Mr. Redmain slept soundly, and in the morning was
beyond a doubt better.

But Mary could not think of leaving him until Mr. Brett came. At
Mr. Redmain's request she rang the bell. Mewks made his
appearance, with the face of a ghost. His master told him to
bring his breakfast.

"And see, Mewks," he added, in a tone of gentleness that
terrified the man, so unaccustomed was he to such from the mouth
of his master--"see that there is enough for Miss Marston as
well. She has had nothing all night. Don't let my lady have any
trouble with it.--Stop," he cried, as Mewks was going, "I won't
have you touch it either; I am fastidious this morning. Tell the
young woman they call Jemima to come here to Miss Marston."

Mewks slunk away. Jemima came, and Mr. Redmain ordered her to get
breakfast for himself and Mary. It was done speedily, and Mary
remained in the sick-chamber until the lawyer arrived.




CHAPTER LV.

DISAPPEARANCE.


"I am afraid I must ask you to leave us now, Miss Marston," said
Mr. Brett, seated with pen, ink, and paper, to receive his new
client's instructions.

"No," said Mr. Redmain; "she must stay where she is. I fancy
something happened last night which she has got to tell us
about."

"Ah! What was that?" asked Mr. Brett, facing round on her.

Mary began her story with the incident of her having been pursued
by some one, and rescued by the blacksmith, whom she told her
listeners she had known in London. Then she narrated all that had
happened the night before, from first to last, not forgetting the
flame that lighted the closet as they approached the window.

"Just let me see those memoranda," said Mr. Brett to Mr. Redmain,
rising, and looking for the paper where he had left it the day
before.

"It was of that paper I was this moment thinking," answered Mr.
Redmain.

"It is not here!" said Mr. Brett.

"I thought as much! The fool! There was a thousand pounds there
for her! I didn't want to drive her to despair: a dying man must
mind what he is about. Ring the bell and see what Mewks has to
say to it."

Mewks came, in evident anxiety.

I will not record his examination. Mr. Brett took it for granted
he had deliberately and intentionally shut out Mary, and Mewks
did not attempt to deny it, protesting he believed she was boring
his master. The grin on that master's face at hearing this was
not very pleasant to behold. When examined as to the missing
paper, he swore by all that was holy he knew nothing about it.

Mr. Brett next requested the presence of Miss Yolland. She was
nowhere to be found. The place was searched throughout, but there
was no trace of her.

When the doctor arrived, the bottle Joseph had taken from her was
examined, and its contents discovered.

Lady Malice was grievously hurt at the examination she found had
been going on.

"Have I not nursed you like my own brother, Mr. Redmain?" she
said.

"You may be glad you have escaped a coroner's inquest in your
house, Lady Margaret!" said Mr. Brett.

"For me," said Mr. Redmain, "I have not many days left me, but
somehow a fellow does like to have his own!"

Hesper sought Mary, and kissed her with some appearance of
gratitude. She saw what a horrible suspicion, perhaps even
accusation, she had saved her from. The behavior and
disappearance of Sepia seemed to give her little trouble.

Mr. Brett got enough out of Mewks to show the necessity of his
dismissal, and the doctor sent from London a man fit to take his
place.

Almost every evening, until he left Durnmelling, Mary went to see
Mr. Redmain. She read to him, and tried to teach him, as one
might an unchildlike child. And something did seem to be getting
into, or waking up in, him. The man had never before in the least
submitted; but now it looked as if the watching spirit of life
were feeling through the dust-heap of his evil judgments, low
thoughts, and bad life, to find the thing that spirit had made,
lying buried somewhere in the frightful tumulus: when the two met
and joined, then would the man be saved; God and he would be
together. Sometimes he would utter the strangest things--such as
if all the old evil modes of thinking and feeling were in full
operation again; and sometimes for days Mary would not have an
idea what was going on in him. When suffering, he would
occasionally break into fierce and evil language, then be
suddenly silent. God and Satan were striving for the man, and
victory would be with him with whom the man should side.

For some time it remained doubtful whether this attack was not,
after all, going to be the last: the doctor himself was doubtful,
and, having no reason to think his death would be a great grief
in the house, did not hesitate much to express his doubt. And,
indeed, it caused no gloom. For there was little love in the
attentions the Mortimers paid him; and in what other hope could
Hesper have married, than that one day she would be free, with a
freedom informed with power, the power of money! But to the
mother's suggestions as to possible changes in the future, the
daughter never responded: she had no thought of plans in common
with her.

Strange rumors came abroad. Godfrey Wardour heard something of
them, and laughed them to scorn. There was a conspiracy in that
house to ruin the character of the loveliest woman in creation!
But when a week after week passed, and he heard nothing of or
from her, he became anxious, and at last lowered his pride so far
as to call on Mary, under the pretense of buying something in the
shop.

His troubled look filled her with sympathy, but she could not
help being glad afresh that he had escaped the snares laid for
him. He looked at her searchingly, and at last murmured a request
that she would allow him to have a little conversation with her.

She led the way to her parlor, closed the door, and asked him to
take a seat. But Godfrey was too proud or too agitated to sit.

"You will be surprised to see me on such an errand, Miss
Marston!" he said.

"I do not yet know your errand," replied Mary; "but I may not be
so much surprised as you think."

"Do not imagine," said Godfrey, stiffly, "that I believe a word
of the contemptible reports in circulation. I come only to ask
you to tell me the real nature of the accusations brought against
Miss Yolland: your name is, of course, coupled with them."

"Mr. Wardour," said Mary, "if I thought you would believe what I
told yon, I would willingly do as you ask me. As it is, allow me
to refer you to Mr. Brett, the lawyer, whom I dare say you know."

Happily, the character of Mr. Brett was well known in Testbridge
and all the country round; and from him Godfrey Wardour learned
what sent him traveling on the Continent again--not in the hope
of finding Sepia. What became of her, none of her family ever
learned.

Some time after, it came out that the same night on which the
presence of Joseph rescued Mary from her pursuer, a man speaking
with a foreign accent went to one of the surgeons in Testbridge
to have his shoulder set, which he said had been dislocated by a
fall. When Joseph heard it, he smiled, and thought he knew what
it meant.

Hesper was no sooner in London, than she wrote to Mary, inviting
her to go and visit her. But Mary answered she could no more
leave home, and must content herself with the hope of seeing Mrs.
Redmain when she came to Durnmelling.

So long as her husband lived, the time for that did not again
arrive; but when Mary went to London, she always called on her,
and generally saw Mr. Redmain. But they never had any more talk
about the things Mary loved most. That he continued to think of
those things, she had one ground of hoping, namely, the kindness
with which he invariably received her, and the altogether gentler
manner he wore as often and as long as she saw him. Whether the
change was caused by something better than physical decay, who
knows save him who can use even decay for redemption? He lived
two years more, and died rather suddenly. After his death, and
that of her father, which followed soon, Hesper went again to
Durnmelling, and behaved better to her mother than before. Mary
sometimes saw her, and a flicker of genuine friendship began to
appear on Hesper's part.

Mr. Turnbull was soon driving what he called a roaring trade. He
bought and sold a great deal more than Mary, but she had business
sufficient to employ her days, and leave her nights free, and
bring her and Letty enough to live on as comfortably as they
desired--with not a little over, to use, when occasion was, for
others, and something to lay by for the time of lengthening
shadows.

Turnbull seemed to hare taken a lesson from his late narrow
escape, for he gave up the worst of his speculations, and
confined himself to "_genuine business-principles_"--the
more contentedly that, all Marston folly swept from his path, he
was free to his own interpretation of the phrase. He grew a rich
man, and died happy--so his friends said, and said as they saw.
Mrs. Turnbull left Testbridge, and went to live in a small
county-town where she was unknown. There she was regarded as the
widow of an officer in her Majesty's service, and, as there was
no one within a couple of hundred miles to support an assertion
to the contrary, she did not think it worth her while to make
one: was not the supposed brevet a truer index to her
consciousness of herself than the actual ticket by ill luck
attached to her--Widow of a linen-draper?

George carried on the business; and, when Mary and he happened to
pass in the street, they nodded to each other.

Letty was diligent in business, but it never got into her heart.
She continued to be much liked, and in the shop was delightful.
If she ever had another offer of marriage, the fact remained
unknown. She lived to be a sweet, gracious little old lady--and
often forgot that she was a widow, but never that she was a wife.
All the days of her appointed time she waited till her change
should come, and she should find her Tom on the other side,
looking out for her, as he had said he would. Her mother-in-law
could not help dying; but she never "forgave" her--for what,
nobody knew.

After a year or so, Mrs. Wardour began to take a little notice of
her again; but she never asked her to Thornwick until she found
herself dying. Perhaps she then remembered a certain petition in
the Lord's prayer. But will it not be rather a dreadful thing for
some people if they are forgiven as they forgive?

Old Mr. Duppa died, and a young man came to minister to his
congregation who thought the baptism of the spirit of more
importance than the most correct of opinions concerning even the
baptizing spirit. From him Mary found she could learn, and would
be much to blame if she did not learn. From him Betty also heard
what increased her desire to be worth something before she went
to rejoin Tom.

Joseph Jasper became once more Mary's pupil. She was now no more
content with her little cottage piano, but had an instrument of
quite another capacity on which to accompany the violin of the
blacksmith.

To him trade came in steadily, and before long he had to build a
larger shoeing-shed. From a wide neighborhood horses were brought
him to be shod, cart-wheels to be tired, axles to be mended,
plowshares to be sharpened, and all sorts of odd jobs to be done.
He soon found it necessary to make arrangement with a carpenter
and wheelwright to work on his premises. Before two years were
over, he was what people call a flourishing man, and laying by a
little money.

"But," he said to Mary, "I can't go on like this, you know, miss.
I don't want money. It must be meant to do something with, and I
must find out what that something is."




CHAPTER LVI.

A CATASTROPHE.


One winter evening, as soon as his work was over for the day,
Joseph locked the door of his smithy, washed himself well, put on
clean clothes, and, taking his violin, set out for Testbridge:
Mary was expecting him to tea. It was the afternoon of a holiday,
and she had closed early.

Was there ever a happier man than Joseph that night as he strode
along the footpath? A day of invigorating and manly toil behind
him, folded up in the sense of work accomplished; a clear sky
overhead, beginning to breed stars; the pale amber hope of
to-morrow's sunrise low down in the west; a frosty air around him,
challenging to the surface the glow of the forge which his day's
labor had stored in his body; his heart and brain at rest with
his father in heaven; his precious violin under his arm; before
him the welcoming parlor, where two sweet women waited his
coming, one of them the brightest angel, in or out of heaven, to
him; and the prospect of a long evening of torrent-music between
them--who, I repeat, could have been more blessed, heart, and
soul, and body, than Joseph Jasper? His being was like an all-
sided lens concentrating all joys in the one heart of his
consciousness. God only knows how blessed he could make us if we
would but let him! He pressed his violin-case to his heart, as if
it were a living thing that could know that he loved it.

Before he reached the town, the stars were out, and the last of
the sunset had faded away. Earth was gone, and heaven was all.
Joseph was now a reader, and read geology and astronomy: "I've
got to do with them all!" he said to himself, looking up. "There
lie the fields of my future, when this chain of gravity is
unbound from my feet! Blessed am I here now, my God, and blessed
shall I be there then."

When he reached the suburbs, the light of homes was shining
through curtains of all colors. "Every nest has its own birds,"
said Joseph; "every heart its own joys!" Just then, he was in no
mood to think of the sorrows. But the sorrows are sickly things
and die, while the joys are strong divine children, and shall
live for evermore.

When he reached the streets, all the shops he passed were closed,
except the beer-shops and the chemists'. "The nettle and the
dock!" said Joseph.

When he reached Mary's shop, he turned into the court to the
kitchen-door. "Through the kitchen to the parlor!" he said.
"Through the smithy to the presence-chamber! O my God--through
the mud of me, up to thy righteousness!"

He was in a mood for music--was he not? One might imagine the
violin under his arm was possessed by an angel, and, ignoring his
ears, was playing straight into his heart!

Beenie let him in, and took him up to the parlor. Mary came half-
way to meet him. The pressure as of heaven's atmosphere fell
around him, calming and elevating. He stepped across the floor,
still, stately, and free. He laid down his violin, and seated
himself where Mary told him, in her father's arm-chair by the
fire. Gentle nothings with a down of rainbows were talked until
tea was over, and then without a word they set to their music--
Mary and Joseph, with their own hearts and Letty for their
audience.

They had not gone far on the way to fairyland, however, when
Beenie called Letty from the room, to speak to a friend and
customer, who had come from the country on a sudden necessity for
something from the shop. Letty, finding herself not quite equal
to the emergency, came in her turn to call Mary: she went as
quietly as if she were leaving a tiresome visitor. The music was
broken, and Joseph left alone with the dumb instruments.

But in his hands solitude and a violin were sure to marry in
music. He began to play, forgot himself utterly, and, when the
customer had gone away satisfied, and the ladies returned to the
parlor, there he stood with his eyes closed, playing on, nor
knowing they were beside him. They sat down, and listened in
silence.

Mary had not listened long before she found herself strangely
moved. Her heart seemed to swell up into her throat, and it was
all she could do to keep from weeping. A little longer and she
was compelled to yield, and the silent tears flowed freely.
Letty, too, was overcome--more than ever she had been by music.
She was not so open to its influences as Mary, but her eyes were
full, and she sat thinking of her Tom, far in the regions that
are none the less true that we can not see them.

A mood had taken shape in the mind of the blacksmith, and
wandered from its home, seeking another country. It is not the
ghosts of evil deeds that alone take shape, and go forth to
wander the earth. Let but a mood be strong enough, and the soul,
clothing itself in that mood as with a garment, can walk abroad
and haunt the world. Thus, in a garment of mood whose color and
texture was music, did the soul of Joseph Jasper that evening,
like a homeless ghost, come knocking at the door of Mary Marston.
It was the very being of the man, praying for admittance, even as
little Abel might have crept up to the gate from which his mother
had been driven, and, seeing nothing of the angel with the
flaming sword, knocked and knocked, entreating to be let in,
pleading that all was not right with the world in which he found
himself. And there Mary saw Joseph stand, thinking himself alone
with his violin; and the violin was his mediator with her, and
was pleading and pleading for the admittance of its master. It
prayed, it wept, it implored. It cried aloud that eternity was
very long, and like a great palace without a quiet room.
"Gorgeous is the glory," it sang; "white are the garments, and
lovely are the faces of the holy; they look upon me gently and
sweetly, but pitifully, for they know that I am alone--yet not
alone, for I love. Oh, rather a thousand-fold let me love and be
alone, than be content and joyous with them all, free of this
pang which tells me of a bliss yet more complete, fulfilling the
gladness of heaven!"

All the time Joseph knew nothing of where his soul was; for he
thought Mary was in the shop, and beyond the hearing of his
pleader. Nor was this exactly the shape the thing took to the
consciousness of the musician. He seemed to himself to be
standing alone in a starry and moonlit night, among roses, and
sweet-peas, and apple-blossoms--for the soul cares little for the
seasons, and will make its own month out of many. On the bough of
an apple-tree, in the fair moonlight, sat a nightingale, swaying
to and fro like one mad with the wine of his own music, singing
as if he wanted to break his heart and have done, for the delight
was too much for mortal creature to endure. And the song of the
bird grew the prayer of a man in the brain and heart of the
musician, and thence burst, through the open fountain of the
violin, and worked what it could work, in the world of forces. "I
love thee! I love thee! I love thee!" cried the violin; and the
worship was entreaty that knew not itself. On and on it went,
ever beginning ere it ended, as if it could never come to a
close; and the two sat listening as if they cared but to hear,
and would listen for ever--listening as if, when the sound
ceased, all would be at an end, and chaos come again.

Ah, do not blame, thou who lovest God, and fearest the love of
the human! Hast thou yet to learn that the love of the human is
love, is divine, is but a lower form of a part of the love of
God? When thou lovest man, or woman, or child, yea, or even dog,
aright, then wilt thou no longer need that I tell thee how God
and his Christ would not be content with each other alone in the
glories even of the eternal original love, because they could
create more love. For that more love, together they suffered and
patiently waited. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath
seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?

A sob, like a bird new-born, burst from Mary's bosom. It broke
the enchantment in which Joseph was bound. That enchantment had
possessed him, usurping as it were the throne of his life, and
displacing it; when it ceased, he was not his own master. He
started--to conscious confusion only, neither knowing where he
was nor what he did. His limbs for the moment were hardly his
own. How it happened he never could tell, but he brought down his
violin with a crash against the piano, then somehow stumbled and
all but fell. In the act of recovering himself, he heard the neck
of his instrument part from the body with a tearing, discordant
cry, like the sound of the ruin of a living world. He stood up,
understanding now, holding in his hand his dead music, and
regarding it with a smile sad as a winter sunset gleaming over a
grave. But Mary darted to him, threw her arms round him, laid her
head on his bosom, and burst into tears. Tenderly he laid his
broken violin on the piano, and, like one receiving a gift
straight from the hand of the Godhead, folded his arms around the
woman--enough, if music itself had been blotted from his
universe! His violin was broken, but his being was made whole!
his treasure taken--type of his self, and a woman given him
instead!

"It's just like him!" he murmured.

He was thinking of him who, when a man was brought him to be
delivered from a poor palsy, forgave him his sins.




CHAPTER LVII.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING.


Joseph Jasper and Mary Marston were married the next summer. Mary
did not leave her shop, nor did Joseph leave his forge. Mary was
proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but
because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right
woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day
will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the
youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is
a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more
_gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the
hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books,
and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain
white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher
point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is
of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see
boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or
a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing
in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as
buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than
to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who
are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows
how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that
he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty
under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we
must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the
seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two
years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people
as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these
are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will
never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have
never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because
they were right in looking up each to the other from the first.
Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.

".... The man is honest." "Therefore he will be, Timon."

It was a lovely morning in summer. The sun was but a little way
above the horizon, and the dew-drops seemed to have come
scattering from him as he shook his locks when he rose. The
foolish larks were up, of course, for they fancied, come what
might of winter and rough weather, the universe founded in
eternal joy, and themselves endowed with the best of all rights
to be glad, for there was the gladness inside, and struggling to
get outside of them. And out it was coming in a divine profusion!
How many baskets would not have been wanted to gather up the
lordly waste of those scattered songs! in all the trees, in all
the flowers, in every grass-blade, and every weed, the sun was
warming and coaxing and soothing life into higher life. And in
those two on the path through the fields from Testbridge, the
same sun, light from the father of lights, was nourishing highest
life of all--that for the sake of which the Lord came, that he
might set it growing in hearts of whose existence it was the very
root.

Joseph and Mary were taking their walk together before the day's
work should begin. Those who have a good conscience, and are not
at odds with their work, can take their pleasure any time--as
well before their work as after it. Only where the work of the
day is a burden grievous to be borne, is there cause to fear
being unfitted for duty by antecedent pleasure. But the joy of
the sunrise would linger about Mary all the day long in the
gloomy shop; and for Joseph, ho had but to lift his head to see
the sun hastening on to the softer and yet more hopeful splendors
of the evening. The wife, who had not to begin so early, was
walking with her husband, as was her custom, even when the
weather was not of the best, to see him fairly started on his
day's work. It was with something very like pride, yet surely
nothing evil, that she would watch the quick blows of his brawny
arm, as he beat the cold iron on the anvil till it was all aglow
like the sun that lighted the world--then stuck it into the
middle of his coals, and blew softly with his bellows till the
flame on the altar of his work-offering was awake and keen. The
sun might shine or forbear, the wind might blow or be still, the
path might be crisp with frost or soft with mire, but the
lighting of her husband's forge-fire, Mary, without some forceful
reason, never omitted to turn by her presence into a holy
ceremony. It was to her the "Come let us worship and bow down" of
the daily service of God-given labor. That done, she would kiss
him, and leave him: she had her own work to do. Filled with
prayer she would walk steadily back the well-known way to the
shop, where, all day long, ministering with gracious service to
the wants of her people, she would know the evening and its
service drawing nearer and nearer, when Joseph would come, and
the delights of heaven would begin afresh at home, in music, and
verse, and trustful talk. Every day was a life, and every evening
a blessed death--type of that larger evening rounding our day
with larger hope. But many Christians are such awful pagans that
they will hardly believe it possible a young loving pair should
think of that evening, except with misery and by rare compulsion!

That morning, as they went, they talked--thus, or something like
this:

"O Mary!" said Joseph, "hear the larks! They are all saying:
'Jo-seph! Jo-seph! Hearkentome, Joseph! Whatwouldyouhavebeenbutfor
Mary, Jo-seph?' That's what they keep on singing, singing in the
ears of my heart, Mary!"

"You would have been a true man, Joseph, whatever the larks may
say."

"A solitary melody, praising without an upholding harmony, at
best, Mary!"

"And what should I have been, Joseph? An inarticulate harmony--
sweetly mumbling, with never a thread of soaring song!"

A pause followed.

"I shall be rather shy of your father, Mary," said Joseph.
"Perhaps he won't be content with me."

"Even if you weren't what you are, my father would love you
because I love you. But I know my father as well as I know you;
and I know you are just the man it must make him happy afresh,
even in heaven, to think of his Mary marrying. You two can hardly
be of two minds in anything!"

"That was a curious speech of Letty's yesterday! You heard her
say, did you not, that, if everybody was to be so very good in
heaven, she was afraid it would be rather dull?"

"We mustn't make too much of what Letty says, either when she's
merry or when she's miserable. She speaks both times only out of
half-way down."

"Yes, yes! I wasn't meaning to find any fault with her; I was
only wishing to hear what you would say. For nobody can make a
story without somebody wicked enough to set things wrong in it,
and then all the work lies in setting them right again, and, as
soon as they are set right, then the story stops."

"There's no thing of the sort in music, Joseph, and that makes
one happy enough."

"Yes, there is, Mary. There's strife and difference and
compensation and atonement and reconciliation."

"But there's nothing wicked."

"No, that there is not."

"Well!" said Mary, "perhaps it may only be because we know so
little about good, that it seems to us not enough. We know only
the beginnings and the fightings, and so write and talk only
about them. For my part, I don't feel that strife of any sort is
necessary to make me enjoy life; of all things it is what makes
me miserable. I grant you that effort and struggle add
immeasurably to the enjoyment of life, but those I look upon as
labor, not strife. There may be whole worlds for us to help bring
into order and obedience. And I suspect there must be no end of
work in which is strife enough--and that of a kind hard to bear.
There must be millions of spirits in prison that want preaching
to; and whoever goes among them will have that which is behind of
the afflictions of Christ to fill up. Anyhow there will be plenty
to do, and that's the main thing. Seeing we are made in the image
of God, and he is always working, we could not be happy without
work."

"Do you think we shall get into any company we like up there?"
said Joseph. "I must think a minute. When I want to understand, I
find myself listening for what my father would say. Yes, I think
I know what he would say to that: 'Yes; but not till you are fit
for it; and then the difficulty would be to keep out of it. For
all that is fit must come to pass in the land of fitnesses--that
is, the land where all is just as it ought to be.'--That's how I
could fancy I heard my father answer you."

"With that answer I am well content," said Joseph.--"But you
don't want to die, do you, Mary?"

"No; I want to live. And I've got such a blessed plenty of life
while waiting for more, that I am quite content to wait. But I do
wonder that some people I know, should cling to what they call
life as they do. It is not that they are comfortable, for they
are constantly complaining of their sufferings; neither is it
from submission to the will of God, for to hear them talk you
must think they imagine themselves hardly dealt with; they
profess to believe the Gospel, and that it is their only
consolation; and yet they speak of death as the one paramount
evil. In the utmost weariness, they yet seem incapable of
understanding the apostle's desire to depart and be with Christ,
or of imagining that to be with him can be at all so good as
remaining where they are. One is driven to ask whether they can
be Christians any further than anxiety to secure whatever the
profession may be worth to them will make them such."

"Don't you think, though," said Joseph, "that some people have a
trick of putting on their clothes wrong side out, and so making
themselves appear less respectable than they are? There was my
sister Ann: she used to go on scolding at people for not
believing, all the time she said they could not believe till God
made them--if she had said _except_ God made them, I should
have been with her there!--and then talking about God so, that I
don't see how, even if they could, any one would have believed in
such a monster as she made of him; and then, if you objected to
believe in such a God, she would tell you it was all from the
depravity of your own heart you could not believe in him; and yet
this sister Ann of mine, I know, once went for months without
enough to eat--without more than just kept body and soul
together, that she might feed the children of a neighbor, of whom
she knew next to nothing, when their father lay ill of a fever,
and could not provide for them. And she didn't look for any
thanks neither, except it was from that same God she would have
to be a tyrant from the beginning--one who would calmly behold
the unspeakable misery of creatures whom he had compelled to
exist, whom he would not permit to cease, and for whom he would
do a good deal, but not all that he could. Such people, I think,
are nearly as unfair to themselves as they are to God."

"You're right, Joseph," said Mary. "If we won't take the
testimony of such against God, neither must we take it against
themselves. Only, why is it they are always so certain they are
in the right?"

"For the perfecting of the saints," suggested Joseph, with a
curious smile.

"Perhaps," answered Mary. "Anyhow, we may get that good out of
them, whether they be here for the purpose or not. I remember Mr.
Turnbull once accusing my father of irreverence, because he spoke
about God in the shop. Said my father, 'Our Lord called the old
temple his father's house and a den of thieves in the same
breath.' Mr. Turnbull saw nothing but nonsense in the answer.
Said my father then, 'You will allow that God is everywhere?' 'Of
course,' replied Mr. Turnbull. 'Except in this shop, I suppose
you mean?' said my father. 'No, I don't. That's just why I
wouldn't have you do it.' 'Then you wouldn't have me think about
him either?' 'Well! there's a time for everything.' Then said my
father, very solemnly, 'I came from God, and I'm going back to
God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my
life.' And that was nothing to Mr. Turnbull either."

To one in ten of my readers it may be something.

Just ere they came in sight of the smithy, they saw a lady and
gentleman on horseback flying across the common.

"There go Mrs. Redmain and Mr. Wardour!" said Joseph. "They're to
be married next month, they say. Well, it's a handsome couple
they'll make! And the two properties together'll make a fine
estate!"

"I hope she'll learn to like the books he does," said Mary. "I
never could get her to listen to anything for more than three
minutes."

Though Joseph generally dropped work long before Mary shut the
shop, she yet not unfrequently contrived to meet him on his way
home; and Joseph always kept looking out for her as he walked.

That very evening they were gradually nearing each other--the one
from the smithy, the other from the shop--with another pair
between them, however, going toward Testbridge--Godfrey Wardour
and Hesper Redmain.

"How strange," said Hesper, "that after all its chances and
breakings, old Thornwick should be joined up again at last!"

Partly by a death in the family, partly through the securities
her husband had taken on the property, partly by the will of her
father, the whole of Durnmelling now belonged to Hesper.

"It is strange," answered Godfrey, with an involuntary sigh.

Hesper turned and looked at him.

It was not merely sadness she saw on his face. There was
something there almost like humility, though Hesper was not able
to read it as such. He lifted his head, and did not avoid her
gaze.

"You are wondering, Hesper," he said, "that I do not respond with
more pleasure. To tell you the truth, I have come through so much
that I am almost afraid to expect the fruition of any good.
Please do not imagine, you beautiful creature! it is of the
property I am thinking. In your presence that would be
impossible. Nor, indeed, have I begun to think of it. I shall,
one day, come to care for it, I do not doubt--that is, when once
I have you safe; but I keep looking for the next slip that is to
come--between my lip and this full cup of hap-piness. I have told
you all, Hesper, and I thank you that you do not despise me. But
it may well make me solemn and fearful, to think, after all the
waves and billows that have gone over me, such a splendor should
be mine!--But, do you really love me, Hesper--or am I walking in
my sleep? I had thought, 'Surely now at last I shall never love
again!'--and instead of that, here I am loving, as I never loved
before!--and doubting whether I ever did love before!"

"I never loved before," said Hesper. "Surely to love must be a
good thing, when it has made you so good! I am a poor creature
beside you, Godfrey, but I am glad to think whatever I know of
love you have taught me. It is only I who have to be ashamed!"

"That is all your goodness!" interrupted Godfrey. "Yet, at this
moment, I can not quite be sorry for some things I ought to be
sorry for: but for them I should not be at your side now--happier
than I dare allow myself to feel. I dare hardly think of those
things, lest I should be glad I had done wrong."

"There are things I am compelled to know of myself, Godfrey,
which I shall never speak to you about, for even to think of them
by your side would blast all my joy. How plainly Mary used to
tell me what I was! I scorned her words! It seemed, then, too
late to repent. And now I am repenting! I little thought ever to
give in like this! But of one thing I am sure--that, if I had
known you, not all the terrors of my father would have made me
marry the man."

Was this all the feeling she had for her dead husband? Although
Godfrey could hardly at the moment feel regret she had not loved
him, it yet made him shiver to hear her speak of him thus. In the
perfected grandeur of her external womanhood, she seemed to him
the very ideal of his imagination, and he felt at moments the
proudest man in the great world; but at night he would lie in
torture, brooding over the horrors a woman such as she must have
encountered, to whom those mysteries of our nature, which the
true heart clothes in abundant honor, had been first presented in
the distortions of a devilish caricature. There had been a time
in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her
splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history,
with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for
he was humbler. When those terrible thoughts would come, and the
darkness about him grow billowy with black flame, "God help me,"
he would cry, "to make the buffeted angel forget the past!"

They had talked of Mary more than once, and Godfrey, in part
through what Hesper told him of her, had come to see that he was
unjust to her. I do not mean he had come to know the depth and
extent of his injustice--that would imply a full understanding of
Mary herself, which was yet far beyond him. A thousand things had
to grow, a thousand things to shift and shake themselves together
in Godfrey's mind, before he could begin to understand one who
cared only for the highest.

Godfrey and Hesper made a glorious pair to look at--but would
theirs be a happy union?--Happy, I dare say--and not too happy.
He who sees to our affairs will see that the _too_ is not in
them. There were fine elements in both, and, if indeed they
loved, and now I think, from very necessity of their two hearts,
they must have loved, then all would, by degrees, by slow
degrees, most likely, come right with them.

If they had been born again both, before they began, so to start
fresh, then like two children hand in hand they might have run in
through the gates into the city. But what is love, what is loss,
what defilement even, what are pains, and hopes, and
disappointments, what sorrow, and death, and all the ills that
flesh is heir to, but means to this very end, to this waking of
the soul to seek the home of our being--the life eternal? Verily
we must be born from above, and be good children, or become, even
to our self-loving selves, a scorn, a hissing, and an endless
reproach.

If they had had but Mary to talk to them! But they did not want
her: she was a good sort of creature, who, with all her
disagreeableness, meant them well, and whom they had misjudged a
little and made cry! They had no suspicion that she was one of
the lights of the world--one of the wells of truth, whose springs
are fed by the rains on the eternal hills.

Turning a clump of furze-bushes on the common, they met Mary. She
stepped from the path. Mr. Wardour took off his hat. Then Mary
knew that his wrath was past, and she was glad.

They stopped. "Well, Mary," said Hesper, holding out her hand,
and speaking in a tone from which both haughtiness and
condescension had vanished, "where are you going?"

"To meet my husband," answered Mary. "I see him coming."

With a deep, loving look at Hesper, and a bow and a smile to
Godfrey, she left them, and hastened to meet her working-man.

Behind Godfrey Wardour and Hesper Redmain walked Joseph Jasper
and Mary Marston, a procession of love toward a far-off, eternal
goal. But which of them was to be first in the kingdom of heaven,
Mary or Joseph or Hesper or Godfrey, is not to be told: they had
yet a long way to walk, and there are first that shall be last,
and last that shall be first.






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