Mistress and Maid Part 9

Elizabeth went back to her kitchen, and stood listening for her young mistress's familiar knock. Mr. Lyon seemed to have listened too, for before she could reach it the door was already opened.

There was a warm greeting--to her great relief: for she knew she had broken the domestic laws in admitting a stranger unawares--and then Elizabeth heard them all three go into the parlor, where they remained talking, without ringing for either tea or candles, a full quarter of an hour.

Miss Hilary at last came out, but much to Elizabeth's surprise, went straight up into her bedroom without entering the kitchen at all.

It was some minutes more before she descended; and then, after giving her orders for tea, and seeing that all was arranged with special neatness, she stood absently by the kitchen fire. Elizabeth noticed how wonderfully bright her eyes were, and what a soft, happy smile she had. She noticed it, because she had never seen Miss Hilary look exactly like that before; and she never did again.

"Don't you be troubling yourself with waiting about here," she said; and her mistress seemed to start at being spoken to. "I'll get the tea all right, Miss Hilary. Please go back into the parlor."

Hilary went in.

CHAPTER VI.

Elizabeth got tea ready with unwonted diligence and considerable excitement. Any visitor was a rare occurrence in this very quiet family; but a gentleman visitor--a young gentleman too--was a remarkable fact, arousing both interest and curiosity. For in the latter quality this girl of seventeen could scarcely be expected to be deficient; and as to the former, she had so completely identified herself with the family she served, that all their concerns were her concerns also. Her acute comments on their few guests, and on their little scholars, sometimes amused Hilary as much as her criticisms on the books she read. But as neither were ever put forward intrusively or impertinently, she let them pa.s.s, and only laughed over them with Johanna in private.

In speaking of these said books, and the questions they led to, it was not likely but that mistress and maid--one aged twenty-two, and the other seventeen--should occasionally light upon a subject rather interesting to women of their ages, though not commonly discussed between mistresses and maids. Nevertheless, when it did come in the way, Miss Hilary never shirked it, but talked it out, frankly and freely, as she would to any other person.

"The girl has feelings and notions on the matter, like all other girls, I suppose," reasoned she to herself; "so it is important that her notions should be kept clear, and her feelings right. It may do her some good, and save her from much harm."

And so it befell that Elizabeth Hand, whose blunt ways, unlovely person, and temperament so oddly nervous and reserved, kept her from attracting any "sweetheart" of her own cla.s.s, had unconsciously imbibed her mistress's theory of love. Love, pure and simple, the very deepest and highest, sweetest and most solemn thing in life: to be believed in devoutly until it came, and when it did come, to be held to, firmly, faithfully, with a single-minded, settled constancy, till death. A creed, quite impossible, many will say, in this ordinary world, and most dangerous to be put into the head of a poor servant. Yet a woman is but a woman, be she maid-servant or queen; and if, from queens to maid-servants, girls were taught thus to think of love, there might be a few more "broken" hearts perhaps, but there would certainly be fewer wicked hearts; far fewer corrupted lives of men, and degraded lives of women; far fewer unholy marriages, and desolated, dreary, homeless homes.

Elizabeth, having cleared away her tea-things, stood listening to the voices in the parlor, and pondering. She had sometimes wondered in her own mind that no knight ever came to carry off her charming princess--her admired and beloved Miss Hilary. Miss Hilary, on her part, seemed totally indifferent to the youths at s...o...b..ry; who indeed were, Elizabeth allowed, quite unworthy her regard. The only suitable lover for her young mistress must be somebody exceedingly grand and n.o.ble--a compound of the best heroes of Shakespeare, Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Maria Edgeworth, and Harriet Martineau. When this strange gentleman appeared--in ordinary coat and hat, or rather Glengary bonnet, neither particularly handsome nor particularly tall, yet whose coming had evidently given Miss Hilary so much pleasure, and who, once or twice while waiting at tea, Elizabeth fancied she had seen looking at Miss Hilary as n.o.body ever looked before--when Mr. Robert Lyon appeared on the horizon, the faithful "bower maiden"

was a good deal disappointed.

She had expected something better; at all events, something different. Her first brilliant castle in the air fell, poor la.s.s! but she quickly built it up again, and, with the vivid imagination of her age, she mapped out the whole future, ending by a vision of Miss Hilary, all in white, sweeping down the Terrace in a carriage and pair--to fortune and happiness; leaving herself, though with a sore want at her heart, and a great longing to follow, to devote the remainder of her natural life to Miss Johanna.

"Her couldna do without somebody to see to her--and Miss Selina do worrit her so." muttered Elizabeth, in the excitement of this Almaschar vision, relapsing into her old provincialisms. "So, even if Miss Hilary axes me to come, I'll stop, I reckon. Ay, I'll stop wi'

Miss Leaf."

This valorous determination taken, the poor maid servant's dream was broken by the opening of the parlor door, and an outcry of Ascott's for his coat and gloves, he having to fetch his aunts home at nine o'clock, Mr. Lyon accompanying him. And as they all stood together at the front door, Elizabeth overheard Mr. Lyon say something about what a beautiful night it was.

"It would do you no harm, Miss Hilary; will you walk with us?"

"If you like."

Hilary went up stairs for her bonnet and shawl; but when, a minute or two after, Elizabeth followed her with a candle, she found her standing in the centre of the room, all in the dark, her face white and her hands trembling.

"Thank you, thank you!" she said mechanically, as Elizabeth folded and fastened her shawl for her--and descended immediately. Elizabeth watched her take, not Ascott's arm, but Mr. Lyon's, and walk down the terrace in the starlight.

"Some'at's wrong. I'd like to know who's been a-vexin' of her,"

thought fiercely the young servant.

No, n.o.body had been "a-vexing" her mistress. There was n.o.body to blame; only there had happened to Hilary one of those things which strike like a sword through a young and happy heart, taking all the life and youth out of it.

Robert Lyon had, half an hour ago, told her--and she had had to hear it as a piece of simple news, to which she had only to say, "Indeed!"--that to day and to-morrow were his two last days at s...o...b..ry--almost his last in England. Within a week he was to sail for India.

There had befallen him what most people would have considered a piece of rare good fortune. At the London University, a fellow student, whom he had been gratuitously "coaching" in Hindostanee, fell ill, and was "thrown upon his hands." as he briefly defined services which must have been great, since they had resulted in this end. The young man's father--a Liverpool and Bombay merchant--made him an offer to go out there, to their house, at a rising salary of 300 rupees a month for three years; after the third year to become a junior partner; remaining at Bombay in that capacity for two years more.

This he told to Hilary and Ascott in almost as few words as I have here put it--for brevity seemed a refuge to him. It was also to one of them. But Ascott asked so many questions that his aunt needed to ask none. She only listened, and tried to take all in, and understand it, that is, in a consecutive, intelligent, business shape, without feeling it. She dared not let herself feel it, not for a second, till they were out, arm-in-arm, under the quiet winter stars. Then she heard his voice asking her, "So you think I was right?"

"Right?" she echoed mechanically.

"I mean in accepting that sudden chance, and changing my whole plan of life. I did not do it--believe me--without a motive."

"What motive?" she would once unhesitatingly have asked; now she could not.

Robert Lyon continued speaking, distinctly and yet in an undertone, that though Ascott was walking a few yards off, Hilary felt was meant for her alone to hear.

"The change is, you perceive, from the life of a student to that of a man of business. I do not deny that I preferred the first. Once upon a time to be a fellow in a college, or a professor, or the like, was my utmost aim and I would have half killed myself to attain it. Now, I think differently."

He paused, but did not seem to require an answer, and it did not come.

"I want, not to be rich but to get a decent competence, and to get it as soon as I can. I want not to ruin my health with incessant study.

I have already injured it a good deal."

"Have you been ill? You never said so."

"Oh no, it was hardly worth while. And I knew an active life would soon set me right again. No fear! there's life in the old dog yet. He does not wish to die. But," Mr. Lyon pursued, "I have had a 'sair fecht' the last year or two. I would not go through it again, nor see any one dear to me go through it. It is over, but it has left its scars. Strange! I have been poor all my life, yet I never till now felt an actual terror of poverty."

Hilary shrank within herself; less even at the words than at something in their tone--something hard, nay fierce; something at once despairing and aggressive.

"It is strange," she said; "such a terror is not like you. I feel none; I can not even understand it."

"No, I knew you could not," he muttered; and was silent.

So was Hilary. A vague trouble came over her. Could it be that he, Robert Lyon, had been seized with the _auri sacra fames_, which he had so often inveighed against and despised? that his long battle with poverty had caused in him such an overweening desire for riches that, to obtain them, he would sacrifice every thing else, exile himself to a far country for years, selling his very life and soul for gold?

Such a thought of him was so terrible--that is, would have been were it tenable--that Hilary for an instant felt herself shiver all over.

The next she spoke out--in justice to him she forced herself to speak out--all her honest soul.

"I do believe that this going abroad to make a fortune, which young men so delight in, is often a most fatal mistake. They give up far more than they gain--country, home, health. I think a man has no right to sell his life any more than his soul for so many thousands a year."

Robert Lyon smiled--"No, and I am not selling mine. With my temperate habits I have as good a chance of health at Bombay as in London--perhaps better. And the years I must be absent I would have been absent almost as much from you--I mean they would have been spent in work as engrossing and as hard. They will soon pa.s.s, and then I shall come home rich--rich. Do you think I am growing mercenary?"

"No."

"Tell me what you do think about me?"

"I--can not quite understand."

"And I cannot make you understand. Perhaps I will, some day when I come back again. Till then, you must trust me, Hilary."

It happens occasionally, in moments of all but tolerable pain, that some small thing, a word, a look, a touch of a hand, lets in such a gleam of peace that nothing ever extinguishes the light of it: it burns on for years and years, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured, but as ineffaceable from life and memory as a star from its place in the heavens. Such, both then, and through the lonely years to come, were those five words, "You must trust me. Hilary."

She did; and in the perfection of that trust her own separate ident.i.ty, with all its consciousness of pain, seemed annihilated; she did not think of herself at all, only of him, and with him, and for him. So, for the time being, she lost all sense of personal suffering, and their walk that night was as cheerful and happy as if they were to walk together for weeks and months and years, in undivided confidence and content, instead of its being the last--the very last.

Some one has said that all lovers have, soon or late, to learn to be only friends: happiest and safest are those in whom the friendship is the foundation--always firm and ready to fall back upon, long after the fascination of pa.s.sion dies. It may take a little from the romance of these two if I own that Robert Lyon talked to Hilary not a word about love, and a good deal about pure business, telling her all his affairs and arrangements, and giving her as clear an idea of his future life as it was possible to do within the limits of one brief half hour.