A Red Wallflower Part 89

'I am beginning to think ambition is rather an empty thing, sir.'

'See, here is Butler. Don't you read _Hudibras?_'

'No, sir.'

'You should. It's very clever. Then here is Spenser, next to him. You are devoted to _The Faerie Queene_, of course!'

'I never read it.'

'You might do worse,' remarked Pitt, who was just before them with his mother.

'Does anybody read Spenser now?'

'It is a poor sign for the world if they do not.'

'One cannot read everything,' said Betty. 'I read Shakspeare; I am glad to see _his_ monument.'

It was a relief to pa.s.s on at last from the crowd of literary folk into the n.o.bler parts of the Abbey; and yet, as the impression of its wonderful beauty and solemn majesty first fully came upon Miss Frere, it was oddly accompanied by an instant jealous pang: 'He will bring somebody else here some day, who will come as often as she likes, be at home here, and enjoy the Abbey as if it were her own property.' And Betty wished she had never come; and in the same inconsistent breath was exceedingly rejoiced that she had come. Yes, she would take all of the beauty in that she could; take it and keep it in her memory for ever; taste it while she had it, and live on the after-taste for the rest of her life. But the taste of it was at the moment sharp with pain.

Pitt had procured from one of the canons, who had been his uncle's friend, an order which permitted them to go their own way and take their own time, unaccompanied and untrammelled by vergers. No showman was necessary in Pitt's presence; he could tell them all, and much more than they cared about knowing. Mrs. Dallas, indeed, cared for little beyond the tokens of England's antiquity and glory; her interest was mostly expended on the royal tombs and those connected with them. For was not Pitt now, virtually, one of the favoured nation, by habit and connection as well as in blood? and did not England's greatness send down a reflected light on all her sons?--only poetical justice, as it was earlier sons who had made the greatness. But of that Mrs. Dallas did not think. 'England' was an abstract idea of majesty and power, embodied in a land and a government; and Westminster Abbey was in a sort the record and visible token of the same, and testimony of it, in the face of all the world. So Mrs. Dallas enjoyed Westminster Abbey, and her heart swelled in contemplation of its glories; but its real glories she saw not. Lights and shadows, colouring, forms of beauty, a.s.sociations of tenderness, majesties of age, had all no existence for her. The one feeling in exercise, which took its nourishment from all she looked upon, was pride. But pride is a dull kind of gratification; and the good lady's progress through the Abbey could not be called satisfactory to one who knew the place.

Mr. Dallas was neither proud nor pleased. He was, however, an Englishman, and Westminster Abbey was intensely English, and to go through and look at it was the right thing to do; so he went; doing his duty.

And beside these two went another bit of humanity, all alive and quivering, intensely sensitive to every impression, which must needs be more or less an impression of suffering. Her folly, she told herself, it was which had so stripped her of her natural defences, and exposed her to suffering. The one only comfort left was, that n.o.body knew it; and n.o.body should know it. The practice of society had given her command over herself, and she exerted it that day; all she had.

They were making the tour of St. Edmund's chapel.

'Look here, Betty,' cried Mrs. Dallas, who was still a little apart from the others with her son,--'come here and see this! Look here--the tomb of two little children of Edward III.!'

'After going over some of the other records, ma'am, I can but call them happy to have died little.'

'But isn't it interesting? Pitt tells me there were _six_ of the little princess's brothers and sisters that stood here at her funeral, the Black Prince among them. Just think of it! Around this tomb!'

'Why should it be more interesting to us than any similar gathering of common people? There is many a spot in country graveyards at home where more than six members of a family have stood together.'

'But, my dear, these were Edward the Third's children.'

'Yes. He was something when he was alive; but what is he to us now? And why should we care,'--Betty hastily went on to generalities, seeing the astonishment in Mrs. Dallas's face,--'why should we be more interested in the monuments and deaths of the great, than in those of lesser people? In death and bereavement all come down to a common humanity.'

'Not a _common_ humanity!' said Mrs. Dallas, rather staring at Betty.

'All are alike on the other side, mother,' observed Pitt. 'The king's daughter and the little village girl stand on the same footing, when once they have left this state of things. There is only one n.o.bility that can make any difference then.'

'"One n.o.bility!"' repeated Mrs. Dallas, bewildered.

'You remember the words,--"Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is _my mother_, _and my sister_, _and brother_." The village girl will often turn out to be the daughter of the King then.'

'But you do not think, do you,' said Betty, 'that _all_ that one has gained in this life will be lost, or go for nothing?

Education--knowledge--refinement,--all that makes one man or woman really greater and n.o.bler and richer than another,--will _that_ be all as though it had not been?--no advantage?'

'What we know of the human mind forbids us to think so. Also, the a.n.a.logy of G.o.d's dealings forbids it. The child and the fully developed philosopher do not enter the other world on an intellectual level; we cannot suppose it. _But_, all the gain on the one side will go to heighten his glory or to deepen his shame, according to the fact of his having been a servant of G.o.d or no.'

'I don't know where you are getting to!' said Mrs. Dallas a little vexedly.

'If we are to proceed at this rate,' suggested her husband, 'we may as well get leave to spend all the working days of a month in the Abbey.

It will take us all that.'

'After all,' said Betty as they moved, 'you did not explain why we should be so much more interested in this tomb of Edward the Third's children than in that of any farmer's family?'

'My dear,' said Mrs. Dallas, 'I am astonished to hear you speak so. Are not _you_ interested?'

'Yes ma'am; but why should I be? For really, often the farmer's family is the more respectable of the two.'

'Are you such a republican, Betty? I did not know it.'

'There is a reason, though,' said Pitt, repressing a smile, 'which even a republican may allow. The contrast here is greater. The glory and pomp of earthly power is here brought into sharp contact with the nothingness of it, So much yesterday,--so little to-day. Those uplifted hands in prayer are exceedingly touching, when one remembers that all their mightiness has come down to that!'

'It is not every fool that thinks so,' remarked Mr. Dallas ambiguously.

'No,' said Betty, with a sudden impulse of championship; 'fools do not think at all.'

'Here is a tablet to Lady Knollys,' said Pitt, moving on. 'She was a niece of Anne Boleyn, and waited upon her to the scaffold.'

'But that is only a tablet,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'Who is this, Pitt?' She was standing before an effigy that bore a coronet; Betty beside her.

'That is the d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk; the mother of Lady Jane Grey.'

'I see,' said Betty, 'that the Abbey is the complement of the Tower.

Her daughter and her husband lie there, under the pavement of the chapel. How comes she to be here?'

'Her funeral was after Elizabeth came to the throne. But she had been in miserable circ.u.mstances, poor woman, before that.'

'I wonder she lived at all,' said Betty, 'after losing husband and daughter in that fashion! But people do bear a great deal and live through it!'

Which words had an application quite private to the speaker, and which no one suspected. And while the party were studying the details of the tomb of John of Eltham, Pitt explaining and the others trying to take it in, Betty stood by with pa.s.sionate thoughts. '_They_ do not care,'

she said to herself; 'but he will bring some one else here, some day, who will care; and they will come and come to the Abbey, and delight themselves in its glories, and in each other, alternately. What do I here? and what is the English Abbey to me?'

She showed no want of interest, however, and no wandering of thought; on the contrary, an intelligent, thoughtful, gracious attention to everything she saw and everything she heard. Her words, she knew, though she could not help it, were now and then flavoured with bitterness.

In the next chapel Mrs. Dallas heard with much sympathy and wonder the account of Catharine of Valois and her remains.

'I don't think she ought to lie in the vault of Sir George Villiers, if he _was_ father of the Duke of Buckingham,' she exclaimed.

'That Duke of Buckingham had more honour than belonged to him, in life and in death,' said Betty.

'It does not make much difference now,' said Pitt.

They went on to the chapel of Henry VII. And here, and on the way thither, Betty almost for a while forgot her troubles in the exceeding majesty and beauty of the place. The power of very exquisite beauty, which always and in all forms testifies to another world where its source and its realization are, came down upon her spirit, and hushed it as with a breath of balm; and the littleness of this life, of any one individual's life, in the midst of the efforts here made to deny it, stood forth in most impressive iteration. Betty was awed and quieted for a minute. Mr. and Mrs. Dallas were moved differently.