Hetty Wesley Part 21

On this Mrs. Wesley was building when she broke to her husband the news of Hetty's return. He lifted himself in his chair, clutching its arms. His face was gray with spent pa.s.sion.

"Where is she?"

"She has gone for a walk, alone," she answered. She had, in truth, packed Hetty off and watched her across the yard before venturing to her husband's door.

"So best." He dropped back in his chair with a sigh that was more than half composed of relief. "So best, perhaps. I will speak to her later."

He looked at his wife with hopeless inquiry. She bowed her head for sign that it was indeed hopeless.

Now Molly had sought her mother early and spoken up. But Molly (who intended nothing so little) had not only made herself felt, for the first time in her life, as a person to be reckoned with, but had also done the most fatally foolish thing in her life by winding up with: "And we--you and father and all of us, but father especially--have driven her to it! G.o.d knows to what you will drive her yet: for she has taken an oath under heaven to marry the first man who offers, and she is capable of it, if you will not be sensible."

--Which was just the last thing Hetty would have forbidden her to tell, yet just the last thing Hetty would have told, had she been pleading for Molly. For Hetty had long since gauged her mother and knew that, while her instinct for her sons' interests was well-nigh impeccable, on any question that concerned her daughters she would blunder nine times out of ten.

So now Mrs. Wesley, meaning no harm and foreseeing none, answered her husband gravely, "She has told me nothing. But she swears she will marry the first man who offers."

The Rector shut his mouth firmly. "That decides it," he answered.

"Has she gone in search of the fool?"

But this was merely a cry of bitterness. As Mrs. Wesley stole from the room, he opened a drawer in his table, pulled out some sheets of ma.n.u.script, and gazed at them for a while without fixing his thoughts. He seldom considered his daughters. Women had their place in the world: that place was to obey and bear children: to carry on the line for men. It was a father's duty to take care that their husbands should be good men, worthy of the admixture of good blood.

The family which yielded its daughters to this office yielded them as its surplus. They did not carry on its name, which depended on its sons. . . . He had three sons: but of all his daughters Hetty had come nearest to claim a son's esteem. Something masculine in her mind had encouraged him to teach her Latin and Greek. It had been an experiment, half seriously undertaken; it had come to be seriously pursued. Not even John had brought so flexible a sense of language.

In accuracy she could not compare with John, nor in that masculine apprehension which seizes on logic even in the rudiments of grammar.

Mr. Wesley--a poet himself, though by no means a great one--had sometimes found John too pragmatical in demanding reasons for this and that. "Child," he had once protested, "you think to carry everything by dint of argument; but you will find how little is ever done in the world by close reasoning": and, turning to his wife in a pet, "I profess, sweetheart, I think our Jack would not attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for it." To Hetty, on the other hand, beauty--beauty in language, in music, in all forms of art, no less than the beauty of a spring day-- was an ultimate thing and lay beyond questions: and Mr. Wesley, though as a divine he checked her somewhat pagan impulses and recalled them to give account of their ground of choice, as a scholar could not help admiring them. For they seldom led her to choose wrongly. In Hetty dwelt something of the Attic instinct which, in days of literary artifice and literary fashions from which she could not wholly escape, kept her taste fresh and guided her at once to browse on what was natural and health-giving and to reject with delicate disgust what was rank and overblown. Himself a sardonic humorist, he could enjoy the bubbling mirth with which she discovered comedy in the objects of their common derision. Himself a hoplite in study, laborious, without sense of proportion, he could look on and smile while she, a woman, walked more nimbly, picking and choosing as she went.

The ma.n.u.script he held was a poem of hers, scored with additions and alterations of his own, by which (though mistakenly) he believed he had improved it: a song of praise put in the mouth of a disciple of Plato: its name, "Eupolis, his Hymn to the Creator." As he turned the pages, his eyes paused and fastened themselves on a pa.s.sage here and there:

"Sole from sole Thou mak'st the sun On his burning axles run: The stars like dust around him fly, And strew the area of the sky: He drives so swift his race above, Mortals can't perceive him move: So smooth his course, oblique or straight, Olympus shakes not with his weight.

As the Queen of solemn Night Fills at his vase her orb of light-- Imparted l.u.s.tre--thus we see The solar virtue shines by Thee.

EIRESIONE! we'll no more For its fancied aid implore, Since bright _oil_ and _wool_ and _wine_ And life-sustaining _bread_ are Thine; _Wine_ that sprightly mirth supplies, n.o.ble wine for sacrifice. . . ."

The verses, though he repeated them, had no meaning for him.

He remembered her sitting at the table by the window (now surrendered to Johnny Whitelamb) and transcribing them into a fair copy, sitting with head bent and the sunlight playing on her red-brown hair: he remembered her standing by his chair with a flushed face, waiting for his verdict. But though his memory retained these visions, they carried no sentiment. He only thought of the young, almost boyish, promise in the lines:

"Omen, monster, prodigy!

Or nothing is, or Jove, from thee.

Whether various Nature's play, Or she, renversed, thy will obey, And to rebel man declare Famine, plague or wasteful war . . .

No evil can from Thee proceed; 'Tis only suffered, not decreed. . . ."

He gazed from the careful handwriting to the horizon beyond his window. Why had he fished out the poem from its drawer? She, the writer--his child--was a wanton.

CHAPTER V.

Hetty had found a patch of ragged turf and mallow where the woodstack hid her from the parsonage windows; and sat there in the morning sun--unconsciously, as usual, courting its full rays. Between her and the stack the ground was bare, strewn with straw and broken twigs. She supposed that her father would send for her soon: but she was preparing no defence, no excuses. She hoped, indeed, that the interview would be short, but simply because the account she must render to him seemed trivial beside that which she must render to herself. Her eyes watched the hens as they scratched pits in the warm dust, snuggled down and adjusted and readjusted their wing-feathers. But her brain was busied over and over with the same thought--"I am now a bad woman. Is there yet any way for me to be good?"

Yet her wits were alert enough. She heard her father's footstep on the path twenty yards away, guessed the moment which would bring him into sight of her. Though she did not look up, she knew that he had come to a halt. She waited. He turned and walked slowly away.

She knew why he had faltered. Her mind ran back to the problem.

"I am a bad woman. Is there any way for me to be good?"

Half an hour pa.s.sed. Emilia came round the rick, talking to herself, holding a wooden bowl from which she had been feeding the chickens.

She came upon Hetty unawares and stood still, with a face at first confused, but gradually hardening.

"Sit down, Emmy." Hetty pointed to a f.a.ggot lying a few paces off.

Emilia hesitated.

"You may sit down: near enough to listen--"

'Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, let Emmy bow to it.'

"You were reciting as you came along." She raised her eyes with a grave smile. "Shall I tell you your secret?"

"What secret?" asked Emilia, reddening in spite of herself.

"Oh, I have known it a long while! But if you want me to whisper it, you must come closer. Nay, my dear, I know very little of the stage--perhaps as little as you: but, from what I have read, it will bring you close to creatures worse than I."

Emilia was scared now. "Who told you? Have you heard from Jacky?-- no, he couldn't, because--"

"--Because you never told him, although you may have hinted at it.

And if you told him, he would laugh and call it the ambition of a girl who knows nothing of the world."

"I will not starve here. And now that this--this disgrace--"

"Father would think it no less disgrace to see you an actress.

Listen: a little while ago he came this way, meaning to curse me, but he turned back and did not. And now you come, and are confused, and I read you just as plainly. While my wits are so clear I want to say one or two things to you. Yesterday--only yesterday--I left home for ever, and here I am back again. I have been wicked, you say, and there is nothing sinful in becoming an actress. Perhaps not: yet I am sure father would think it sinful--even more selfishly sinful than my fault, because it would hurt the careers of Jacky and Charles; and that, as you know, he would never forgive."

"Who are you, to be lecturing me?"

"I am your sister, who has done wrong: I have tasted bitter fruit and must go eating it all my life. But it is fruit of knowledge--ah, listen, Emmy! If you do this and become famous, the greater your fame, the greater the injury; or so father would hold it, and perhaps our brothers too. Hetty can be hidden and forgotten in a far country parish. But can Jacky become a bishop, having an actress for sister?"

"You are sudden in this thought for your brothers."

"It is not of them I am thinking. I say that if you succeed you will lose father's forgiveness and always carry with you this sorrowful knowledge. Yet I would bid you go and do it; for to be great is worth much cost of sorrow, and sorrow might even increase your greatness. But have you that strength? And if you should not succeed?--We know nothing of the world: all our thoughts of it come out of books and dreaming. You imagine yourself treading the boards and holding all hearts captive with your voice. So I used to imagine myself slaying dragons. So, only yesterday, I believed--"

She sat erect with a shiver. "To wake and find all your dreams changed to squalor, and for you no turning back! Have you the strength, Emmy--to go forward and change that squalor back again by sheer force into beautiful dreams? Have you the strength?"

She gazed at Emilia and added musingly, "No, you have not the strength. You will stay on here in the cage, an obedient woman, your talent repressed to feed the future of those grand brothers of ours who take all we give, yet cannot help us one whit. They take it innocently; they do not know; and they are dear good fellows.

But they cannot help. I only have done what may injure them--though I do not think it will: and when father came along the path just now, he was thinking of them rather than of me--of me only as I might injure them."

She was right indeed. Mr. Wesley had left the house thinking of her: but a few steps had called up the faces of his sons, and by habit, since he thought of them always on his walks. His studies put aside, to think of them was his one recreation. Coming upon Hetty, he had felt himself taken at unawares, and retreated.

"--And when he turned away," Hetty went on, "I understood. And I felt sorry for him; because all of a sudden it came to me that he may be wiser than any of us, and one day it will be made plain to us, what we have helped to do--or to spoil."

"Here is someone you had better be sorry for," said Emilia, glancing along the path at the sound of footsteps and catching sight of Nancy.

"She has made up her mind that John Lambert will have no more to do with us now; and the wedding not a month away!"

Sure enough, Nancy's eyes were red, and she gazed at Hetty less with reprobation than with lugubrious reproach.

"Then she knows less of John Lambert than I do," said Hetty; "and still less how deep he is in love with her. Nancy dear," she asked, "was he to have walked over this morning?"