Weighed and Wanting Part 42

The same day lord Gartley called, but was informed by Sarah, who opened the door but a c.h.i.n.k, that the small-pox was in the house, and that she could admit no one but the doctor. To his exclamation she made answer that her young mistress was perfectly well, but could and would see n.o.body--was in attendance upon the sick. So his lordship was compelled to go without seeing her, not without a haunting doubt that he was being played upon, and she did not want to see him.

As had happened more than once before, soon after he was gone the major made his appearance. To him Sarah gave the same answer, adding by her mistress's directions, that in the meantime there was no occasion to prosecute inquiry about Mr. Cornelius, for it was all--as Sarah put it--explained, and her mistress would write to him.

But what was Hester to tell her father and mother? Until she knew with certainty the fact of her marriage, she shrank from mentioning Amy; and at present it was impossible to find out anything from Cornelius. She merely wrote, therefore, that she had found him, but very ill; that she would take the best care of him she could, and as soon as he was able to be moved, bring him home to be nursed by his mother.

The great room was for the mean time given over to the Frankses. The wife kept everything tidy, and they managed things their own way. Hester made inquiry now and then, to be sure they were having everything they wanted, but left them to provide for themselves.

She did her best to help Amy without letting her brother suspect her presence, and by degrees she got the room more comfortable for them.

Corney had indeed taken a good many things from the house to make habitable the waste expanse, but had been careful not to take anything Sarah would miss.

He was covered with the terrible eruption, and if he survived, which again and again seemed doubtful, would probably be much changed, for Amy could not keep his hands from his face: in trifles the lack of self-restraint is manifested, and its consequences are sometimes grievous.

Hitherto Hester had not let her parents quite know how ill he was--for what may seem a far-fetched reason--not to save them from anxiety, but to save her mother from hearing his father say, the best thing he could do would be to die. Nor was she mistaken: many a time had her father said so to himself. It was simply impossible, he said, that he should ever again speak to him or in any way treat him as a son. He had by his vile conduct ceased to be a son, and he was nowise bound to do anything more for him; though, from mere compa.s.sion, he would keep him from starving till he got some employment to which no character was necessary.

He began at last to recover, but it was long before he could be treated otherwise than as a child--so feeble was he, and so unreasonable. The first time he saw and knew Hester, he closed his eyes and turned away his head as if he would have no more of that apparition. She retired; but, watching, presently saw him, in his own sly way, looking through half closed lids to know whether she was gone. When he saw Amy where Hester had stood, his face beamed up. "Amy," he said, "come here;" and when she went, he took her hand and laid it on his cheek, little knowing what a disfigured cheek it was.

"Thank G.o.d!" said Hester to herself: she had never seen him look so sweet or loving or lovable, despite his disfigurement.

She took care not to show herself again till he should be a little accustomed to the idea of her presence.

The more she saw of Amy the better she liked her. She treated her patient with so much good sense, showed such a readiness to subordinate her ignorance to the wisdom of others, and such a careful obedience to the directions of the doctor, that she rose every day in Hester's opinion, as well as found a yet deeper place in her heart.

His lordship wrote, making an apology for anything he had said, from anxiety about one whom he loved to distraction, in which he might have presumed on the closeness of their relation to each other. He would gladly talk the whole matter over with her as soon as she gave him leave. For his part he had not a moment's doubt that her good sense, relieved from the immediate pressure of her feelings, which were in themselves but too divine for the needs of this world, would convince her of the reasonableness of all he had sought to urge upon her. As soon as she was able, and judged it safe to admit a visitor, his aunt would be happy to call upon her.

For the present, as he knew she would not admit him, he would content himself with frequent and most anxious inquiries after her, reserving argument and expostulation for a happier, and, he hoped, not very distant time.

Hester smiled a curious smile at the prospect of a call from Miss Vavasor: was she actually going to plead her nephew's cause?

As her brother grew better, and things became easier, the thought of lord Gartley came oftener, with something of the old feeling for the man himself, but mingled with sadness and a strange pity. She would never have been able to do anything for him! It had been in her spiritual presumption to think she could save him by the preciousness of her self-gift to him and the strength of her power over him!

If G.o.d cannot save a man by all his good gifts, not even by the gift of a woman offered to his higher nature, but by that refused, the woman's giving of herself a slave to his lower nature can only make him the more unredeemable; while the withholding of herself may do something--may at least, as the years go on, wake in him some sense of what a fool he had been. The man who would go to the dogs for lack of the woman he fancies, will go to the dogs when he has her--may possibly drag her to the dogs with him.

Hester began to see something of this. She recalled how she had never once gained from him a satisfactory reply to anything she said worth saying; she had in her foolishness supplied from her own imagination the defective echoes of his response! Love had made her apt and able to do this; but now that she had yielded entrance to doubt, she saw many things otherwise than before. She loved the man enough to die for him: she would not have one moment hesitated about that; but it was quite another thing to marry him! It was her brother now she had to save! His dear, good little wife was doing all she could for him, but it would take sister and mother and all to save him! She could not do so much for him as Amy now, but by and by there would be his father to meditate with: to that she would give her energy!

But his poor mother! would she recognize him--so terribly scarred and changed? He might in time, being young, grow more like himself, but now he was not pleasant to look upon. Some men are as vain as any women, and Corney was one of those some. While pretending to despise the kindest word concerning his good looks, he had taken the greatest pleasure in them; and the first time he saw himself in a mirror, the look of dismay, of despairing horror that came over his face was as pitiful as it was ludicrous. He had been accustomed to regard himself as one superior on most grounds, on that of good looks in particular, to any one he knew--and now! He could not but admit that he was nothing less than unpleasant to behold--must be so even to those who loved him! It was a pain that in itself could do little to cast out the evil spirit that possessed him, but it was something that that evil spirit, while it remained in him, should be deprived of one source of its nourishment. It was a good thing that from any cause the transgressor should find his ways hard. He dashed the gla.s.s from him, and burst into tears which he did not even try to conceal.

It was notable that from that time he was more dejected, and less peevish; and this latter might not be only from returning health, for he had always been more or less peevish at home, where he never thought of cultivating the same conception or idea of himself as before the eyes of the world. Much of supposed goodness is merely a looking of the thing men would like to be considered--originating doubtless sometimes in an admiration of, perhaps in a vague wish to be that thing, but unaccompanied of desire or strength enough to rouse the smallest endeavour after being it. Still Hester found it difficult to bear with his remaining peevishness and bad temper, knowing what he had made of himself, and that he knew she must know it; but at such hard moments she had the good sense to leave him to the soothing ministrations of his wife. Amy never set herself against him: first of all she would show him that she understood what was troubling him: then would say something sympathetic, or petting, or coaxing, and always had her way with him.

She had the great advantage that not yet had he once quarrelled with her.

That gave a ground of hope for her influence with him that his sister had long lost. G.o.d had made Amy so that she had less trouble from selfishness than all but a few people. Hester, more than Amy, felt her own rights, and was ready to be indignant. She would have far more trouble than Amy in getting rid of the self-a.s.serting self in her, which closes the door against heaven's divinest gifts. In Hester it was no doubt a.s.sociated with a loftier nature, and the harder victory would have its greater reward, but until finally conquered it must continue to obstruct her walk in the true way. So Hester learned from the sweetness of Amy, as Amy from the unbending principle of Hester.

She at last made up her mind that she would take Cornelius home without giving her father the opportunity of saying he should not come. She would presume that he must go home after such an illness: the result she would wait! The meeting could in no case be a happy one, but if he were not altogether repulsed, if the mean devil in him was not thoroughly roused by the harshness of his father, she would think much had been gained!

With gentle watchfulness she regarded Amy, and was more and more satisfied that, whatever might be wrong, she had had a share in it not as one who did, but as one who endured wrong. The sweetness and devotion with which she seemed to live only for her husband was to Hester, who found it impossible to take such a position even in imagination towards Gartley, in her tenderer moments almost a rebuke. But she could not believe that had Amy known before she married him what kind of person Cornelius was, she would have given herself to him. She did not think how nearly the man she had once accepted stood on the same level of manhood. But Amy was the wife of Cornelius, and that made an eternal difference. Her duty was as plain as Hester's--and the same--to do the best for him!

When he was able to be moved, Hester brought them into the house, and placed them in a comfortable room. She then moved the Frankses into the room they had left, making it over to them, subject to her father's pleasure, for a time at least. With their own entrance through the cellar, they were to live there after their own fashion, and follow their own calling, only they were to let Hester know if they found themselves in any difficulty. And now for the first time in her life she wished she had some means of her own, that she might act with freedom.

She had seen hope of freedom in marriage, but now she wished it in independence.

CHAPTER XLVII.

MISS VAVASOR.

About three weeks after lord Gartley's call, during which he had left a good many cards in Addison square, Hester received the following letter from Miss Vavasor: "My dear Miss Raymount, I am very anxious to see you, but fear it is hardly safe to go to you yet. You with your heavenly spirit do not regard such things, but I am not so much in love with the future as to risk my poor present for it. Neither would I willingly be the bearer of infection into my own circle: I am not so selfish as to be careless about that. But communicate with you somehow I must, and that for your own sake as well as Gartley's who is pining away for lack of the sunlight of your eyes. I throw myself entirely on your judgment. If you tell me you consider yourself out of quarantine, I will come to you at once; if you do not, will you propose something, for meet we must."

Hester pondered well before returning an answer. She could hardly say, she replied, that there was no danger, for her brother, who had been ill, was yet in the house, too weak for the journey to Yrndale. She would rather suggest, therefore, that they should meet in some quiet corner of one of the parks. She need hardly add she would take every precaution against carrying infection.

The proposal proved acceptable to Miss Vavasor. She wrote suggesting time and place. Hester agreed, and they met.

Hester appeared on foot, having had to dismiss her cab at the gate; Miss Vavasor, who had remained seated in her carriage; got down as soon as she saw her, and having sent it away, advanced to meet her with a smile: she was perfect in skin-hospitality.

"How long is it now," she began, "since you saw Gartley?"

"Three weeks or a month," replied Hester.

"I am afraid, sadly afraid, you cannot be much of a lover, not to have seen him for so long and look so fresh!" smiled Miss Vavasor, with gently implied reproach, and followed the words with a sigh, as if _she_ had memories of a different complexion.

"When one has one's work to do,--" said Hester.

"Ah, yes!" returned Miss Vavasor, not waiting for the sentence, "I understand you have some peculiar ideas about work. That kind of thing is spreading very much in our circle too. I know many ladies who visit the poor. They complain there are so few un.o.bjectionable tracts to give them. The custom came in with these Woman's-rights. I fear they will upset everything before long. But I hope the world will last my time. No one can tell where such things will end."

"No," replied Hester. "Nothing has ever stopped yet."

"Is that as much as to say that nothing ever will stop?"

"I think it is something like it," said Hester.

"We know nothing about the ends of things--only the beginnings."

There had been an air of gentle raillery in Miss Vavasor's tone, and Hester used the same, for she had no hope of coming to an understanding with her about anything.

"Then the sooner we do the better! I don't see else how things are to go on at all!" said Miss Vavasor, revealing the drop of Irish blood in her.

"When the master comes he will stop a good deal," thought Hester, but she did not say it. She could not allude to such things without at least a possibility of response.

"You and Gartley had a small misunderstanding, he tells me, the last time you met," continued Miss Vavasor, after a short pause.

"I think not," answered Hester; "at least I fancy I understood him very well."

"My dear Miss Raymount, you must not be offended with me. I am an old woman, and have had to compose differences that had got in the way of their happiness between goodness knows how many couples. I am not boasting when I say I have had considerable experience in that sort of thing."

"I do not doubt it," said Hester. "What I do doubt is, that you have had any experience of the sort necessary to set things right between lord Gartley and myself. The fact is, for I will be perfectly open with you, that I saw then--for the first time plainly, that to marry him would be to lose my liberty."

"Not more, my dear, than every woman does who marries at all. I presume you will allow marriage and its duties to be the natural calling of a woman?"