Hester"s eyes fixed on her friend.
"Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves," she asked, "or do you leave them?"
"I do neither," said Rachel. "I treat them just the same as before."
"Then aren"t you a hypocrite, too?"
Hester"s small face was set like a flint.
"I think not," said Rachel, tranquilly, "any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil, which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently, while the good will remain?"
"I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.
"I don"t think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then--"
"Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.
"Then leave them in silence."
"I only know of a woman"s silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"
"I do not. It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation--and--I withdraw."
"You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."
"Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should--"
"Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.
"No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."
"Thrice miserable man!"
"You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"
"Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."
At this moment a hurricane seemed to pa.s.s through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy,"
and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.
"Mother got out at Mrs. Brown"s," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."
"Oh, Regie!" expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."
Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they cl.u.s.tered round her to show what they had bought.
Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time.
The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.
"I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."
"She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."
"I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighborhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen"s sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work.
She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be.
Originality is out of place in a clergyman"s family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonent.i.ty, who have no sense of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her _Idyll_ she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it and an outer one of amiable country neighbors, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them, and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervor and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of grat.i.tude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so."
"She says her temper has become that of a fiend."
"She is pa.s.sionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives, she will outgrow her pa.s.sionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become pa.s.sive, contemplative. Then, instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learned to receive impressions calmly and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far."
CHAPTER XIV
Only those who know the supremacy of the Intellectual life--the life which has a seed of enn.o.bling thought and purpose within it--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.--GEORGE ELIOT.
Hester in the meanwhile was expressing wonder and astonishment at the purchases of the children, who, with the exception of Mary, had spent their little all on presents for Fraulein, whose birthday was on the morrow. After Mary"s tiny white bone umbrella had been discovered to be a needle-case, and most of the needles had been recovered from the floor, Regie extracted from its paper a little china cow. But, alas! the cow"s ears and horns remained in the bag, owing possibly to the incessant pa.s.sage of the parcel from one pocket to another on the way home. Regie looked at the remnants in the bag, and his lip quivered, while Mary, her own umbrella safely warehoused, exclaimed, "Oh, Regie!"
in tones of piercing reproach.
But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fraulein would like it just as much. Still, it was a blow.
Regie leaned his head against Hester"s shoulder.
Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child"s touch till she was a mother; that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor subst.i.tute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.
"The tail is still on," she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.
The cow"s tail was painted in blue upon its side.
"When I bought it," said Regie, in a strangled voice, "and it was a great-deal-of-money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that."
"All the best cows have their tails on the side," said Hester. "And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before." And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.
"And now what has Stella got?"
Stella produced a bag of "bull"s-eyes," which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.
"Fraulein never eats bull"s-eyes," said Mary, who was what her parents called "a very truthful child."
"I eats them," said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upward, were visible.
Stella always turned upsidedown if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.
Hester had hardly set Stella right side upward when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.
"Run up-stairs, my pets," she said. "Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time."