Ideala

Ideala was fourteen when she refused to be confirmed for conscientious scruples, and although she made light of it in this way, she had suffered a good deal and been severely punished at the time for her refusal, but vainly, for she never gave in.

In after-life she held, of course, that Christianity was the highest moral revelation the world had ever known; but when she saw that legal right was not always moral right, I think she began to look for a higher.

By baptism she belonged to the Church of England, but she seems to have thought of the Sacrament always with the idea of transubstantiation in her mind. She spoke of it reverently, but had never been able to take it, and for a curious reason: she said the idea of it nauseated her.

She felt that the elements were unnatural food, and therefore she could not touch them--and this feeling never left her but once, when she was dangerously ill, and yearned, as she told me, for the Sacrament more than for life and health. Day and night the longing never left her; but, not having been confirmed, she did not like to ask for it, and as she recovered the old feeling gradually returned.

Religious difficulties always tormented her more or less. As she grew older she felt with Sh.e.l.ley that belief is involuntary, and a man is neither to be praised nor blamed for it; and she was always ready to acknowledge with Sir Philip Sidney that "Reason cannot show itself more reasonable than to leave reasoning on things above reason," but nevertheless her mind did not rest.

I have also heard her quote, "Credulity is the man"s weakness, but the child"s strength," and add that in matters of faith and religion we are all children, and I have thought at times that she had been able to leave it so; but something always fell from her sooner or later which showed that the old trouble was rankling still--as when she told me once: "I have never heard the Divine voice which has called you and all my friends. I listen for it, but it does not speak. I call, but there is no reply. I wait, but it does not come. The heaven of heavens is dark to me, and the yearning of my soul meets no response. Will it be so for ever?"

No, not for ever--but she was led by tortuous ways, and left to work out her own salvation in very fear and trembling, till the dear human love was given to her in pity to help her to know something of that which is Divine. And then, I hope, above the trouble of her senses, and the turmoil of the world, the Divine voice did call her, and she was able at last to hear.

CHAPTER V.

Ideala often recurred to the subject of work for women.

"There are so many thousands of us," she said, "who have no object in life, and nothing to make us take it seriously. My own is a case in point. I am not necessary, even to my husband. There is nothing I am bound to do for him, or that he requires of me, nothing but to be agreeable when he is with me, which would not interfere with a serious occupation if I had one, and is scarcely interest enough in life for an energetic woman. My household duties take, on an average, half an hour a day; and everything in our house is done regularly, and well done. My social duties may be got through at odd moments, and the more of a pastime I make them the better I fulfil them; and, with the exception of these, there is nothing in my life that I cannot have done for me by some one better able to do it than I am. And even if I had children I should not be much more occupied, for the things they ought to learn from their mothers are best taught by example. For all practical purposes, parents, as a rule, are bad masters for any but very young children. They err on the side of over severity or the reverse. So you see I have no obligations of consequence, and there is, therefore, nothing in my life to inspire a sense of responsibility. And all this seems to me a grievous waste of Me. I remember Lord Wensum telling me, when we discussed this subject, that he was travelling once with a well-known editor, and, noticing the number of villas that had sprung up of late years along the whole line of rail they were on, he said: "I wonder what the ladies in those villas do with their time? I suppose their social duties are limited, and they are too well off to be obliged to trouble themselves about anything." "It is the existence of those villas," the editor answered, "that makes the present profession of the novelist possible." But I think," said Ideala, "that those women might find something better to do than to make a profession for novelists."

"But you do a good deal yourself, Ideala," I ventured.

"Yes, in a purposeless way. All my acts are isolated; it would make little difference if they had never been done."

"Then you are not content, after all, to be merely a poem?" I said, maliciously. "You would like to do as well as to be?"

She laughed. Then, after a little, she said earnestly: "Do you know, I always feel as if I _could_ do something--teach something--or help others in a small way with some work of importance. I never believe I was born just to live and die. But I have a queer feeling about it. I am sure I shall be made to go down into some great depth of sin and misery myself, in order to learn what it is I have to teach."

She loved music, and painting, and poetry, and science, and none of her loves were barren. She embraced them each in turn with an ardour that resulted in the production of an offspring--a song, a picture, a poem, or book on some most serious subject, and all worthy of note. But she was inconstant, and these children of her thought or fancy were generally isolated efforts that marked the culminating point of her devotion, and lessened her interest if they did not exhaust her strength.

Perhaps, though, I wrong her when I call her inconstant. It seems to me now that each new interest was a step by which she mounted upwards, learning to sympathise practically and perfectly with all men in their work as she pa.s.sed them on her way to find her own.

CHAPTER VI.

She knew the poor of the place well, and took a lively interest in all that concerned them; and occasionally she would confide some of her own odd observations and reflections to me.

"On Sunday morning all the women wash their doorsteps," she told me; "I think it is part of their religion."

And on another occasion she said: "They have such lovely children here, and such swarms of them. I am always hard on the women with lovely children. People say it is envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, that makes me so; but it really is because I think women who have nice children should be better than other women. It would be worse for one of them to do a wrong thing than for poor childless me."

This conclusion may be quarrelled with as illogical, but the feeling that led to it was beautiful beyond question; and, indeed, all her ideas on that subject were beautiful.

She went once, soon after she came among us, to comfort a lady in the neighbourhood who had lost a baby at its birth.

"It is sad that you should lose your child," Ideala said to her; "but you are better off than I am, for I never knew what it was to be a mother."

She would have thought it a privilege to have experienced even the sorrows of maternity.

Talking about the people, she told me: "They draw such nice distinctions. They speak of "a lady" and "a real lady." A "real lady"

is a person who gives no trouble. If Mrs. Vanbrugh wants anything from the butcher, and he has already sent to her house once that day, she does not expect him to send again; she sends to him--and she is "a real lady." Mrs. Stanton is also thoughtful, but she is something more; she is sociable and kind, and talks to them all in a friendly way, just as if they were human beings; and she is something more than "a real lady"--she"s "a real nice lady."

"Do you know Mrs. Polter at the fish-shop? What a fine-looking woman she is! Middle-aged, intelligent, and a very good specimen of her cla.s.s, I should think. She has eight children already, and would consider the ninth a further blessing. Her husband is a good-looking man, too, and most devoted. In fact, they are quite an ideal pair with their eight children and their fish-shop. He had to go to Yarmouth the other day to buy bloaters, and while he was away she went by the five o"clock train every morning to choose the day"s supply of fish for the shop, and he was quite unhappy about it. He was afraid she would "overdo" herself, and rather than that should happen he desired her to let the business go to the--ahem! He made her write every day to say how she was, and was wretched till he returned to relieve her of her arduous duties. She made friends with me during the scarlet fever epidemic. Number eight was a baby then, and she was afraid he might catch the disease and be taken to the hospital and die for want of her; and I sympathised strongly with her denunciations of the cruelty of the act. Fancy taking little babies from their mothers! Barbarous, don"t you think it? One day a lady came into the shop while I was there. She was dressed in a bright pink costume, with a large hat all smothered in pink feathers. I thought of the Queen of Sheba, and felt alarmed. Mrs.

Polter told me afterwards she was "just a lady," rolling in recently acquired wealth, and "as hard to please as if she had never washed her own doorstep." It was then I learnt the difference between "a lady" and "a real lady.""

One of Ideala"s exploits got into the paper somehow, and she was annoyed about it, and anxious to make us believe the account of the risk she ran had been greatly exaggerated. I was present when she gave her own version of the story, which was characteristic in every way.

"I heard frantic cries from the river," she said. "Some one was shrieking, "The child will be drowned!" and I ran to see what was the matter. A man was tearing up and down on the bank, a child was struggling in the water, and as there was n.o.body else to be seen he looked to _me_ for a.s.sistance! I advised him to go in and bring the child out, but the idea did not appear to commend itself to him, so he took to running up and down again, bawling, "The child will be drowned!" And indeed it seemed very likely; so I was obliged to go in and bring it out myself. The man was overjoyed when I restored it to him. He clasped it in his arms with every demonstration of affection; and then he looked at me and became embarra.s.sed. He evidently felt that he ought to say something, but the difficulty was what to say. At last a bright idea seemed to strike him. His countenance cleared, and he spoke with much feeling. "I am afraid you are rather wet," he observed; and then he left me, and a sympathetic landlady, who keeps a little public-house by the river, and had witnessed the occurrence, took me in and dried me. She gave me whisky and hot water, and entertained me for the rest of the afternoon. She is a remarkable woman, and I should visit her often were it not for her love of, and faith in, whisky and hot water. I tell her there are five things which make the nose red-- viz., cold, tight-lacing, disease of the right side of the heart, dyspepsia, and alcohol, and the greatest of these is alcohol; but she says a little colour anywhere would be an improvement to me, and I feel that I can have nothing in common with a woman who has such bad taste in the distribution of colour."

CHAPTER VII.

Ideala"s notions of propriety were altogether unconventional. She never could be made to understand that it was not the proper thing to talk familiarly to any one she met, and discuss any subject they were equal to with them.

"It is good for people to talk, and natural, and therefore proper," she said. "If I can give pleasure to a stranger by doing so, or he can give pleasure to me, it would not be right to keep silent."

She carried this idea of her duty to her neighbour rather far sometimes.

I remember her telling me once about two old gentlemen she had travelled with the day before.

"The sun came in and bothered me, and one of them offered to draw the blind," she said, "and he remarked it was rather a treat to see the sun, we have so little of it now; and I said that was true, and told him how I pitied the farmers. I had to stay in my room the other day with a bad cold, and I amused myself watching one of them at work in some fields opposite. The state of his mind was expressed by his boots. On Monday the sun was shining, the air was mild, and it seemed as if we were going to have a continuance of fine weather, and the farmer appeared of a cheerful countenance, and his boots were polished and laced. On Tuesday there was an east wind, veering south, with showers, and his boots were laced, but not polished. On Wednesday there was frost, fog, and gloom, and they were neither laced nor polished. On Thursday there was a snowstorm, and he had no boots at all on; and after that I did not see him, and I wondered if he had committed suicide--in which case I thought the jury might almost have brought in a verdict of "justifiable _felo-de-se_." And when I told that story the other old gentleman shut his book, and began to talk too. And I said I thought the weather was much colder than it used to be, for I could remember wearing muslin dresses in May, and I could not wear them at all now; but I did not know if the change were in the climate or in myself--perhaps a little of both--though, indeed, I knew that, to a certain extent, it was in the climate, which had been very much altered in different districts by drainage, and cutting, or planting--altered for the better, however, as a rule. And one old gentleman had heard that before, but did not understand it exactly, so I explained it to him; and then I talked about changes of climate in general, and the formation of beds of coal, and the ice period, and sun-spots, and the theory of comets, and about my husband getting up to see the last one, and going out in a felt hat and dressing-gown with a bed-candle to look for it--and about that dream of mine, did I tell you? I dreamt the comet came into our drawing-room, and the leg of a Chinese table turned into a snake and snorted at it, and the comet looked so taken aback that I woke myself with a shout of laughter. And then we talked of popular superst.i.tions about comets, and dreams, and ghosts-- particularly ghosts, and I told a number of creepy stories, and one old gentleman pretended he didn"t believe in them, but he did, and so did the other without any pretence; and we talked about Darwinism, and the nature of the soul, and Nihilism, and the state of society--and--and a few other things. And they were such dear delightful old gentlemen, and they knew such a lot, and were so clever; and one of them was a Railway Director, and the other couldn"t let his farms, and was bothered about his pheasants, and wanted to have the trains altered to suit him. I should so like to meet them both again."

"And how long did all this take, Ideala?"

"Oh, some hours. I fancy their dreams would be rather confused last night," she added, naively.

"Poor old gentlemen!" said I.

This sociability and inclination to talk the matter out, and, I may say, a certain amount of innocence and lack of worldly wisdom into the bargain, betrayed her occasionally into small improprieties of conduct that were not to be excused, and would possibly not have been forgiven in any one but Ideala. But such things were allowed in her as certain things are allowed in certain people--not because the things are right in themselves, but because the people who do them see no harm in them.

There are people, too, who seem to enjoy the privilege of making wrong right by doing it. Society, however, only accords this privilege to a limited and distinguished few.

When Ideala saw for herself that she had done an unjustifiable thing she was very ready to confess it. I always fancied she had some latent idea of making atonement in that way. It never mattered how much a story told against herself, nor how much malicious people might make of it to her discredit; she told all, inimitably, and with scrupulous fidelity to fact.

One day she was standing waiting for a train at the station at York, and in her absent way she fixed her eyes on a gentleman who was walking about the platform.

Presently he went up to her, and, without any apology or show of respect, remarked: "I am sure I have seen you before."

"Probably," Ideala rejoined, as if the occurrence were the most natural thing in the world, "but I do not remember you. Perhaps if I heard your name----?"

"Oh, I don"t suppose you ever heard my name," he said.