A loud rap came at the door.
"Mr. Lyon at home?" said Felix in his firm tones. "No, sir," said Esther: "but Miss Lyon is, if you"ll please to walk in."
"Esther!" exclaimed Felix, amazed.
They held each other by both hands, and looked into each other"s faces with delight.
"You are out of prison?"
"Yes, till I do something bad again. But you--how is it all? Are you come back to live here then?"
"Yes."
"You are not going to be married to Harold Transome, or to be rich?"
"No."
"Why?" said Felix in rather a low tone, leaning his elbow on the table, and resting his head on his hand while he looked at her.
"I did not wish to marry him, or to be rich."
"You have given it all up?" said Felix, leaning forward a little and speaking in a still lower tone. "Could you share the life of a poor man, then, Esther?"
"If I thought well enough of him," she said, with a smile, and a pretty movement of her head.
"Have you considered well what it would be?--that it would be a very bare and simple life? and the people I shall live among, Esther? They have not just the same follies and vices as the rich, but they have their own forms of folly and vice. It is very serious, Esther."
"I know it is serious," said Esther, looking up at him. "Since I have been at Transome Court I have seen many things very seriously. If I had not, I should not have left what I did leave. I made a deliberate choice."
She could not tell him that at Transome Court, all that finally seemed balanced against her love for him, was the offer of a silken bondage that arrested all motive, and was nothing better than a well-cushioned despair. A vision of being restless amidst ease, of being languid among all appliances had quickened her resignation of the Transome estates.
Esther explained, however, that she thought of retaining a little of the wealth.
"How?" said Felix, anxiously. "What do you mean?"
"I think even of two pounds a week: one needn"t live up to the splendour of all that, you know: we might live as simply as you liked. And then I think of a little income for your mother, and a little income for my father, to save him from being dependent when he is no longer able to preach!"
Felix put his hand on her shoulder, said, lifting up his eyes with a smile:
"Why, I shall be able to set up a great library, and lend the books!"
They laughed merrily, each holding the other"s arms, like girl and boy.
There was the ineffable sense of youth in common.
Then Felix leaned forward, that their lips might meet, and after that his eyes roved tenderly over her face and curls.
"I"m a rough, severe fellow, Esther. Shall you never repent?--never be inwardly reproaching me that I was not a man who could have shared your wealth? Are you quite sure?"
The very next May, Felix and Esther were married. Everyone in those days was married at the parish church; but Mr. Lyon was not satisfied without an additional private solemnity, "so that he might have a more enlarged utterance of joy and supplication."
It was a very simple wedding; but no wedding, even the gayest, ever raised so much interest and debate in Treby Magna. Even the very great people of the county went to the church to look at this bride, who had renounced wealth, and chosen to be the wife of a man who said he would always be poor.
Some few shook their heads; could not quite believe it; and thought there was more behind. But the majority of honest Trebians were affected somewhat in the same way as Mr. Wall, the brewer of the town, who observed to his wife as they walked home, "I feel somehow as if I believed more in everything that"s good."
Felix and Esther did not take up their abode in Treby Magna; and after awhile Mr. Lyon left the town too, and joined them where they dwelt.
As to the town in which Felix Holt now resides I will keep that a secret.
I will only say that Esther has never repented. Felix, however, grumbles a little that she has made his life too easy.
There is a young Felix, who has a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money.
Romola
"Romola" was George Eliot"s fifth book, and followed "Silas Marner," which was published in 1861. It is a story of Florence in the days of Savonarola, and was largely the outcome of a visit the novelist paid to Italy with her life-long friend, George Henry Lewes. With dim ideas for the story in her mind, she made exhaustive researches in the Florentine libraries, gathering historical and topographical details of the city and its life as they were in the mediaeval period which she was setting herself to re-create. After much study there and at home, and after one false start, she made a serious beginning in January, 1862. She was engaged upon it for eighteen months, always in doubt and sometimes in despair of her ability to accomplish the task, and by June of the following year she had thankfully written the last words of what is regarded by some as her greatest book. Meanwhile, the romance had begun to appear serially in the "Cornhill" in July, 1862. The writing of "Romola" is said to have "ploughed into her" more than any of her other books.
_I.--t.i.to and Little Tessa_
Under the Loggia de Cerchi, in the heart of old Florence, in the early morning of April 9, 1492, two men had their eyes fixed on each other.
One was looking downward with the scrutiny of curiosity; the other, lying on the pavement, was looking upward with the startled gaze of a suddenly awakened dreamer.
"Young man," said the standing figure, pointing to a ring on the finger of the other, "when your chin has got a stiffer crop on it you"ll know better than to take your nap in street corners with a ring like that on your forefinger. By the holy "vangels, if it had been anybody but me standing over you--but Bratti Ferravecchi is not the man to steal! Three years ago, one San Giovanni, the saint, sent a dead body in my way--a blind beggar, with his cap well lined with pieces. But how comes a young man like you, with the face of Messer San Michele, to be sleeping on a stone bed? Your tunic and hose match ill with that jewel, young man.
Anybody might say the saints had sent you a dead body; but if you took the jewels, I hope you buried him--and you can afford a ma.s.s or two for him into the bargain!"
Something like a painful thrill appeared to dart through the frame of the listener, and arrest the careless stretching of his arms. But he immediately recovered an air of indifference, took off the red Levantine cap which hung like a great purse over his left ear, and pushing back his long, dark brown curls, said smiling, "The fact is, I"m a stranger in Florence, and when I came in footsore last night, I preferred flinging myself in the corner of this hospitable porch to hunting for a chance hostelry, which might turn out to be a nest of bloodsuckers. Can you show me the way to a more lively quarter, where I can get a meal and a lodging?"
"That I can," said Bratti.
And, talking volubly as they went, Bratti led the way to the Mercato Vecchio, or the Old Market, promising to conduct him to the prettiest damsel in the Mercato for a cup of milk.
But as soon as they emerged from the narrow streets into the Old Market, they found the place packed with excited groups of men and women humming with gossip.
"Diavolo!" said Bratti. "The Mercato has gone as mad as if the Holy Father had excommunicated us again! I must know what this is."
He pushed about among the crowd, inquiring and disputing, and was presently absorbed in discussing the newest development of Florentine politics, the death of Lorenzo de Medici, and whether or not this death was the beginning of the time of tribulation that Savonarola had been seeing in visions and foretelling in sermons.
Indifferent to this general agitation, the young stranger became tired of waiting for Bratti"s escort, and strolling on round the piazza, felt, on a sudden thought, in the wallet that hung at his waist.
"Not an obolus, by Jupiter!" he murmured, in a language that was not Tuscan or even Italian. "I must get my breakfast for love, then!"
In a corner, away from any group of talkers, two mules were standing.