The Vicar's Daughter Part 34

It contained a bank-note for a hundred pounds. Mr. Morley, though a hard man, was not by any means stingy. She replaced it in the envelope, and laid it again on the chimney-piece.

"You owe me nothing, Mr. Morley," she said.

"Owe you nothing! I owe you more than I can ever repay."

"Then don't try it, please. You are _very_ generous; but indeed I could not accept it."

"You must oblige me. You _might_ take it from _me_," he added, almost pathetically, as if the bond was so close that money was nothing between them.

"You are the last--one of the last I _could_ take money from, Mr. Morley."

"Why?"

"Because you think so much of it, and yet would look down on me the more if I accepted it."

He bit his lip, rubbed his forehead with his hand, threw back his head, and turned away from her.

"I should be very sorry to offend you," she said; "and, believe me, there is hardly any thing I value less than money. I have enough, and could have plenty more if I liked. I would rather have your friendship than all the money you possess. But that cannot be, so long as"--

She stopped: she was on the point of going too far, she thought.

"So long as what?" he returned sternly.

"So long as you are a worshipper of Mammon," she answered; and left the room.

She burst out crying when she came to this point. She had narrated the whole with the air of one making a confession.

"I am afraid it was very wrong," she said; "and if so, then it was very rude as well. But something seemed to force it out of me. Just think: there was a generous heart, clogged up with self-importance and wealth! To me, as he stood there on the hearth-rug, he was a most pitiable object--with an impervious wall betwixt him and the kingdom of heaven! He seemed like a man in a terrible dream, from which I _must_ awake him by calling aloud in his ear--except that, alas! the dream was not terrible to him, only to me! If he had been one of my poor friends, guilty of some plain fault, I should have told him so without compunction; and why not, being what he was? There he stood,--a man of estimable qualities, of beneficence, if not bounty; no miser, nor consciously unjust; yet a man whose heart the moth and rust were eating into a sponge!--who went to church every Sunday, and had many friends, not one of whom, not even his own wife, would tell him that he was a Mammon-worshipper, and losing his life. It may have been useless, it may have been wrong; but I felt driven to it by bare human pity for the misery I saw before me."

"It looks to me as if you had the message given you to give him," I said.

"But--though I don't know it--what if I was annoyed with him for offering me that wretched hundred pounds,--in doing which he was acting up to the light that was in him?"

I could not help thinking of the light which is darkness, but I did not say so. Strange tableau, in this our would-be grand nineteenth century,--a young and poor woman prophet-like rebuking a wealthy London merchant on his own hearth-rug, as a worshipper of Mammon! I think she was right; not because he was wrong, but because, as I firmly believe, she did it from no personal motives whatever, although in her modesty she doubted herself. I believe it was from pure regard for the man and for the truth, urging her to an irrepressible utterance. If so, should we not say that she spoke by the Spirit? Only I shudder to think what utterance might, with an equal outward show, be attributed to the same Spirit. Well, to his own master every one standeth or falleth; whether an old prophet who, with a lie in his right hand, entraps an honorable guest, or a young prophet who, with repentance in his heart, walks calmly into the jaws of the waiting lion.

[Footnote: See the Sermons of the Rev. Henry Whitehead, vicar of St.

John's, Limehouse; as remarkable for the profundity of their insight us for the n.o.ble severity of their literary modelling.--G.M.D.]

And no one can tell what effects the words may have had upon him. I do not believe he ever mentioned the circ.u.mstance to his wife. At all events, there was no change in her manner to Miss Clare. Indeed, I could not help fancying that a little halo of quiet reverence now encircled the love in every look she cast upon her.

She firmly believed that Marion had saved her life, and that of more than one of her children. Nothing, she said, could equal the quietness and tenderness and tirelessness of her nursing. She was never flurried, never impatient, and never frightened. Even when the tears would be flowing down her face, the light never left her eyes nor the music her voice; and when they were all getting better, and she had the nursery piano brought out on the landing in the middle of the sick-rooms, and there played and sung to them, it was, she said, like the voice of an angel, come fresh to the earth, with the same old news of peace and good-will. When the children--this I had from the friend she brought with her--were tossing in the fever, and talking of strange and frightful things they saw, one word from her would quiet them; and her gentle, firm command was always sufficient to make the most fastidious and rebellious take his medicine.

She came out of it very pale, and a good deal worn. But the day they set off for Hastings, she returned to Lime Court. The next day she resumed her lessons, and soon recovered her usual appearance. A change of work, she always said, was the best restorative. But before a month was over I succeeded in persuading her to accept my mother's invitation to spend a week at the Hall; and from this visit she returned quite invigorated.

Connie, whom she went to see,--for by this time she was married to Mr.

Turner,--was especially delighted with her delight in the simplicities of nature. Born and bred in the closest town-environment, she had yet a sensitiveness to all that made the country so dear to us who were born in it, which Connie said surpa.s.sed ours, and gave her special satisfaction as proving that my oft recurring dread lest such feelings might but be the result of childish a.s.sociations was groundless, and that they were essential to the human nature, and so felt by G.o.d himself. Driving along in the pony-carriage,--for Connie is not able to walk much, although she is well enough to enjoy life thoroughly,--Marion would remark upon ten things in a morning, that my sister had never observed. The various effects of light and shade, and the variety of feeling they caused, especially interested her. She would spy out a lurking sunbeam, as another would find a hidden flower. It seemed as if not a glitter in its nest of gloom could escape her. She would leave the carriage, and make a long round through the fields or woods, and, when they met at the appointed spot, would have her hands full not of flowers only, but of leaves and gra.s.ses and weedy things, showing the deepest interest in such lowly forms as few would notice except from a scientific knowledge, of which she had none: it was the thing itself--its look and its home--that drew her attention. I cannot help thinking that this insight was profoundly one with her interest in the corresponding regions of human life and circ.u.mstance.

CHAPTER XXVII.

MISS CLARE AMONGST HER FRIENDS.

I must give an instance of the way in which Marion--I am tired of calling her _Miss Clare_, and about this time I began to drop it--exercised her influence over her friends. I trust the episode, in a story so fragmentary as mine, made up of pieces only of a quiet and ordinary life, will not seem unsuitable. How I wish I could give it you as she told it to me! so graphic was her narrative, and so true to the forms of speech amongst the London poor. I must do what I can, well a.s.sured it must come far short of the original representation.

One evening, as she was walking up to her attic, she heard a noise in one of the rooms, followed by a sound of weeping. It was occupied by a journeyman house-painter and his wife, who had been married several years, but whose only child had died about six months before, since which loss things had not been going on so well between them. Some natures cannot bear sorrow: it makes them irritable, and, instead of drawing them closer to their own, tends to isolate them. When she entered, she found the woman crying, and the man in a lurid sulk.

"What _is_ the matter?" she asked, no doubt in her usual cheerful tone.

"I little thought it would come to this when I married him," sobbed the woman, while the man remained motionless and speechless on his chair, with his legs stretched out at full length before him.

"Would you mind telling me about it? There may be some mistake, you know."

"There ain't no mistake in _that_," said the woman, removing the ap.r.o.n she had been holding to her eyes, and turning a cheek towards Marion, upon which the marks of an open-handed blow were visible enough. "I didn't marry him to be knocked about like that."

"She calls that knocking about, do she?" growled the husband. "What did she go for to throw her cotton gownd in my teeth for, as if it was my blame she warn't in silks and satins?"

After a good deal of questioning on her part, and confused and recriminative statement on theirs, Marion made out the following as the facts of the case:--

For the first time since they were married, the wife had had an invitation to spend the evening with some female friends. The party had taken place the night before; and although she had returned in ill-humor, it had not broken out until just as Marion entered the house. The cause was this: none of the guests were in a station much superior to her own, yet she found herself the only one who had not a silk dress: hers was a print, and shabby. Now, when she was married, she had a silk dress, of which she said her husband had been proud enough when they were walking together. But when she saw the last of it, she saw the last of its sort, for never another had he given her to her back; and she didn't marry him to come down in the world--that she didn't!

"Of course not," said Marion. "You married him because you loved him, and thought him the finest fellow you knew."

"And so he was then, grannie. But just look at him now!"

The man moved uneasily, but without bending his outstretched legs. The fact was, that since the death of the child he had so far taken to drink that he was not unfrequently the worse for it; which had been a rare occurrence before.

"It ain't my fault," he said, "when work ain't a-goin,' if I don't dress her like a d.u.c.h.ess. I'm as proud to see my wife rigged out as e'er a man on 'em; and that _she_ know! and when she cast the contrairy up to me, I'm blowed if I could keep my hands off on her. She ain't the woman I took her for, miss. She _'ave_ a temper!"

"I don't doubt it," said Marion. "Temper is a troublesome thing with all of us, and makes us do things we're sorry for afterwards. _You_'re sorry for striking her--ain't you, now?"

There was no response. Around the sullen heart silence closed again.

Doubtless he would have given much to obliterate the fact, but he would not confess that he had been wrong. We are so stupid, that confession seems to us to fix the wrong upon us, instead of throwing it, as it does, into the depths of the eternal sea.

"I may have my temper," said the woman, a little mollified at finding, as she thought, that Miss Clare took her part; "but here am I, slaving from morning to night to make both ends meet, and goin' out every job I can get a-washin' or a-charin', and never 'avin' a bit of fun from year's end to year's end, and him off to his club, as he calls it!--an' it's a club he's like to blow out my brains with some night, when he comes home in a drunken fit; for it's worse _and_ worse he'll get, miss, like the rest on 'em, till no woman could be proud, as once I was, to call him hers. And when I do go out to tea for once in a way, to be jeered at by them as is no better nor no worse 'n myself, acause I ain't got a husband as cares enough for me to dress me decent!--that do stick i' my gizzard. I do dearly love to have neighbors think my husband care a bit about me, let-a-be 'at he don't, one hair; and when he send me out like that"--

Here she broke down afresh.

"Why didn't ye stop at home then? I didn't tell ye to go," he said fiercely, calling her a coa.r.s.e name.

"Richard," said Marion, "such words are not fit for _me_ to hear, still less for your own wife."

"Oh! never mind me: I'm used to sich," said the woman spitefully.

"It's a lie," roared the man: "I never named sich a word to ye afore. It do make me mad to hear ye. I drink the clothes off your back, do I? If I bed the money, ye might go in velvet and lace for aught I cared!"

"_She_ would care little to go in gold and diamonds, if _you_ didn't care to see her in them," said Marion.

At this the woman burst into fresh tears, and the man put on a face of contempt,--the worst sign, Marion said, she had yet seen in him, not excepting the blow; for to despise is worse than to strike.