A SIMPLE WOMAN.
The Dower-house at Lilford was fixed upon shortly after by general
consent. It was an old house, but showed its original fabric chiefly in
the tall stacks of chimneys which guaranteed its hospitable hearths from
smoke, and gave an architectural distinction to the pile of building,
the walls of which were all matted in honeysuckles, roses, and every
climbing plant that can be imagined, embroidering themselves upon the
background of the ivy, which filled every crevice. And the pleasure of
furnishing, upon which Mr. Loseby had been cunning enough to enlarge, as
an inducement to the ladies to take possession of this old
dwelling-place, proved as great and as delightful as he had represented
it to be. It was a pleasure which none of the three had ever as yet
experienced. Even Mrs. Mountford had never known the satisfaction,
almost greater than that of dressing one’s self--the delight and
amusement of dressing one’s house and making it beautiful. She had been
taken as a bride to the same furniture which had answered for her
predecessor; and though in the course of the last twenty years something
had no doubt been renewed, there is no such gratification in a new
carpet or curtains, which must be chosen either to suit the previous
furniture, or of those homely tints which, according to the usual
formula of the shops, ‘would look well with anything,’ as in the blessed
task of renovating a whole room at once. They had everything to do here,
new papers (bliss! for you may be sure Mrs. Mountford was too
fashionable to consult anybody but Mr. Morris on this important
subject), and a whole array of new old furniture. They did not transfer
the things that had been left at Mount, which would have been, Mrs.
Mountford felt, the right thing to do, but merely selected a few
articles from the mass which nobody cared for. The result, they all
flattered themselves, was fine. Not a trace of newness appeared in all
the carefully decorated rooms. A simulated suspicion of dirt, a ghost of
possible dust, was conjured up by the painter’s skill to make everything
perfect--not in the way of a vulgar copy of that precious element which
softens down the too perfect freshness, but, by a skilful touch of art,
reversing the old principle of economy, and making ‘the new things look
as weel’s the auld.’ This process, with all its delicate difficulties,
did the Mountford family good in every way. To Anne it was the must
salutary and health-giving discipline. It gave her scope for the
exercise of all those secondary tastes and fancies, which keep the
bigger and more primitive sentiments in balance. To be anxious about the
harmony of the new curtains, or concerned about the carpet, is sometimes
salvation in its way; and there were so many questions to decide--things
for beauty and things for use--the character of every room, and the
meaning of it, which are things that have to be studied nowadays before
we come so far down as to consider the conveniences of it, what you are
to sit upon, or lie upon, though these two are questions almost of life
and death. Anne was plunged into the midst of all these questions.
Besides her serious business in the management of the estate which Mr.
Loseby had taken care should occupy her more and more, there were a
hundred trivial play-anxieties always waiting for her, ready to fill up
every crevice of thought. She had, indeed, no time to think. The heart
which had been so deeply wounded, which had been compelled to give up
its ideal and drop one by one the illusions it had cherished, seemed
pushed into a corner by this flood of occupation. Anne’s mind, indeed,
was in a condition of exhaustion, something similar to that which
sometimes deadens the sensations of mourners after a death which in
anticipation has seemed to involve the loss of all things. When all is
over, and the tortures of imagination are no longer added to those of
reality, a kind of calm steals over the wounded soul. The worst has
happened; the blow has fallen. In this fact there is quiet at least
involved, and now the sufferer has nothing to think of but how to bear
his pain. The wild rallying of all his forces to meet a catastrophe to
come is no longer necessary. It is over; and though the calm may be but
‘a calm despair,’ yet it is different from the anguish of looking
forward. And in Anne’s case there was an additional relief. For a long
time past she had been forcing upon herself a fictitious satisfaction.
The first delight of her love, which she had described to Rose as the
power of saying everything to her lover, pouring out her whole heart in
the fullest confidence that everything would interest him and all be
understood, had long ago begun to ebb away from her. As time went on,
she had fallen upon the pitiful expedient of writing to Cosmo without
sending her letters, thus beguiling herself by the separation of an
ideal Cosmo, always the same, always true and tender, from the actual
Cosmo whose attention often flagged, and who sometimes thought the
things that occupied her trivial, and her way of regarding them foolish
or high-flown. Yes, Cosmo too had come to think her high-flown: he had
been impatient even of her fidelity to himself; and gradually it had
come about that Anne’s communications with him were but carefully
prepared abridgments of the genuine letters which were addressed
to--someone whom she had lost, someone, she could not tell who, on whom
her heart could repose, but who was not, so far as she knew, upon this
unresponsive earth. All this strain, this dual life, was over now. No
attempt to reconcile the one with the other was necessary. It was all
over; the worst had happened; there was no painful scene to look forward
to, no gradual loosening of a tie once so dear; but whatever was to
happen had happened. How she might have felt the blank, had no such
crowd of occupations come in to fill up her time and thoughts, is
another question. But, as it was, Anne had no time to think of the
blank. In the exhaustion of the revolution accomplished she was seized
hold upon by all these crowding occupations, her thoughts forced into
new channels, her every moment busy. No soul comes through such a crisis
without much anguish and many struggles, but Anne had little time to
indulge herself. She had to stand to her arms, as it were, night and
day. She explained her position to Mr. Loseby, as has been said, and
she informed her stepmother briefly of the change; but to no one else
did she say a word.
‘There was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.’ Could any
word express more impressively the pause of fate, the quiet of patience
and deliberation over the great and terrible things to come. There was
silence in the heaven of Anne’s being. She forbore to think, forbore to
speak, even to herself. All was still within her. The firmament had
closed in around her. Her world was lessened, so much cut off on every
side, a small world now with no far-shining distances, no long gleams of
celestial light, nothing but the little round about her, the circle of
family details, the work of every day. Instead of the wide sky and the
infinite air, to have your soul concentrated within a circle of Mr.
Morris’s papers, however admirable they may be, makes a great difference
in life. Sometimes she even triumphed over circumstances so far as to
see the humorous side of her own fate, and to calculate with a smile
half pathetic, all that her unreasonable fidelity had cost her. It had
cost her her father’s approbation, her fortune, her place in life, and
oh! strange turning of the tables! it had cost her at the same time the
lover whom she had chosen, in high youthful absolutism and idealism, at
the sacrifice of everything else. Was there ever a stranger
contradiction, completion, of a transaction? He for whom she had given
up all else, was lost to her because she had given everything for him. A
woman might weep her heart out over such a fate, or she might smile as
Anne smiled, pale, with a woful merriment, a tremulous pathetic scorn,
an indignation half lost in that sentiment which made Othello cry out,
‘The pity of it! The pity of it!’ Oh, the pity of it! that such things
should be; that a woman should give so much for so little--and a man
return so little for so much. Sometimes, when she was by herself, this
smile would come up unawares, a scarcely perceptible gleam upon her
pale countenance. ‘What are you smiling at, Anne?’ her stepmother or
Rose would ask her as she sat at work. ‘Was I smiling? I did not
know--at nobody--I myself,’ she would say, quoting Desdemona this time.
Or she would remind herself of a less dignified simile--of poor Dick
Swiveller, shutting up one street after another, in which he had made
purchases which he could not pay for. She had shut up a great many
pleasant paths for herself. Her heart got sick of the usual innocent
romance in which the hero is all nobleness and generosity, and the
heroine all sweet dependence and faith. She grew sick of poetry and all
her youthful fancies. Even places became hateful to her, became as paths
shut up. To see the Beeches even from the road gave her a pang. Mount,
where she had written volumes all full of her heart and inmost thoughts
to Cosmo, pained her to go back to, though she had to do it
occasionally. And she could not think of big London itself without a
sinking of the heart. He was there. It was the scene of her
disenchantment, her disappointment. All these were as so many slices cut
off from her life. Rose’s estate, and the leases, and the tenants, and
the patronage of Lilford parish, which belonged to it, and all its
responsibilities, and the old women, with their tea and flannels, and
the Dower-house with Mr. Morris’s papers--these circumvented and bound
in her life.
But there was one person at least whose affectionate care of her gave
Anne an amusement which now and then found expression in a flood of
tears: though tears were a luxury which she did not permit herself. This
was the Rector, who was always coming and going, and who would walk
round Anne at the writing-table, where she spent so much of her time,
with anxious looks and many little signs of perturbation. He did not say
a great deal to her, but watched her through all the other
conversations that would arise, making now and then a vague little
remark, which was specially intended for her, as she was aware, and
which would strike into her like an arrow, yet make her smile all the
same. When there was talk of the second marriage of Lord Meadowlands’
brother, the clergyman, Mr. Ashley was strong in his defence. ‘No one
can be more opposed than I am to inconstancies of all kinds; but when
you have made a mistake the first time it is a wise thing and a right
thing,’ said the good Rector, with a glance at Anne, ‘to take advantage
of the release given you by Providence. Charles Meadows had made a great
mistake at first--like many others.’ And then, when the conversation
changed, and the Woodheads became the subject of discussion, even in the
fulness of his approbation of ‘that excellent girl Fanny,’ Mr. Ashley
found means to insinuate his constant burden of prophecy. ‘What I fear
is that she will get a little narrow as the years go on. How can a woman
help that who has no opening out in her life, who is always at the first
chapter?’
‘Dear me, Rector,’ said Mrs. Mountford, ‘I did not know you were such an
advocate of marriage.’
‘Yes, I am a great advocate of marriage: without it we all get narrow.
We want new interests to carry on our life; we want to expand in our
children, and widen out instead of closing in.’
‘But Fanny has not closed in,’ said Anne, with a half malicious smile,
which had a quiver of pain in it: for she knew his meaning almost better
than he himself did.
‘No, no, Fanny is an excellent girl. She is everything that can be
desired. But you must marry, Anne, you must marry,’ he said, in a lower
tone, coming round to the back of her chair. There was doubt and alarm
in his eyes. He saw in her that terror of single-minded men, an old
maid. Women have greatly got over the fear of that term of reproach.
But men who presumably know their own value best; and take more deeply
to heart the loss to every woman of their own sweet society, have a
great horror of it. And Anne seemed just the sort of person who would
not marry, having been once disgusted and disappointed, Mr. Ashley
concluded within himself, with much alarm. He was even so far carried
away by his feelings as to burst forth upon his excellent son and
Curate, one evening in the late autumn, when they were returning
together from the Dower-house. They had been walking along for some time
in silence upon the dusty, silent road, faintly lighted by some
prevision of a coming moon, though she was not visible. Perhaps the same
thoughts were in both their minds, and this mutual sympathy warmed the
elder to an overflow of the pent-up feeling. ‘Man alive!’ he cried out
suddenly, turning upon Charley with a kind of ferocity, which startled
the Curate as much as if a pistol had been presented at him. ‘Man alive!
can’t _you_ go in for her? you’re better than nothing if you’re not very
much. What is the good of you, if you can’t try, at least _try_, to
please her? She’s sick of us all, and not much wonder; but, bless my
soul, you’re young, and why can’t you make an effort? why can’t you try?
that’s what I would like to know,’ the Rector cried.
Charley was taken entirely by surprise. He gasped in his agitation,
‘I--_try_? But she would not look at me. What have I to offer her?’ he
said, with a groan.
Upon which the Rector repeated that ungracious formula. ‘You may not be
very much, but you’re better than nothing. No,’ the father said, shaking
his head regretfully, ‘we are none of us very much to look at; but, Lord
bless my soul, think of Anne, _Anne_, settling down as a single woman:
an old maid!’ he cried, with almost a shriek of dismay. The two men
were both quite subdued, broken down by the thought. They could not help
feeling in their hearts that to be anybody’s wife would be better than
that.
But when they had gone on for about half an hour, and the moon had risen
silvery over the roofs of the cottages, showing against the sky the
familiar and beloved spire of their own village church, Charley, who had
said nothing all the time, suddenly found a voice. He said, in his deep
and troubled bass, as if his father had spoken one minute ago instead of
half an hour, ‘Heathcote Mountford is far more likely to do something
with her than I.’
‘Do you think so?’ cried the Rector, who had not been, any more than his
son, distracted from the subject, and was as unconscious as Charley was
of the long pause. ‘She does not know him as she knows you.’
‘That is just the thing,’ said the Curate, with a sigh. ‘She has known
me all her life, and why should she think any more about me? I am just
Charley, that is all, a kind of a brother; but Mountford is a stranger.
He is a clever fellow, cleverer than I am; and, even if he were not,’
said poor Charley, with a tinge of bitterness, ‘he is new, and what he
says sounds better, for they have not heard it so often before. And then
he is older, and has been all about the world; and besides--well,’ the
Curate broke off with a harsh little laugh, ‘that is about all, sir. He
is he, and I am me--that’s all.’
‘If that is what you think,’ said the Rector, who had listened to all
this with very attentive ears, pausing, as he took hold of the upper bar
of his own gate, and raising a very serious countenance to his son, ‘if
this is really what you think, Charley--you may have better means of
judging--we must push Mountford. Anything would be better,’ he said,
solemnly, ‘than to see Anne an old maid. And she’s capable of doing
that,’ he added, laying his hand upon his son’s in the seriousness of
the moment. ‘She is capable of doing it, if we don’t mind.’
Charley felt the old hand chill him like something icy and cold. And he
did not go in with his father, but took a pensive turn round the garden
in the moonlight. No, she would never walk with him there. It was too
presumptuous a thought. Never would Anne be the mistress within, never
would it be permitted to Charley to call her forth into the moonlight in
the sweet domestic sanctity of home. His heart stirred within him for a
moment, then sank, acknowledging the impossibility. He breathed forth a
vast sigh as he lit the evening cigar, which his father did not like him
to smoke in his presence, disliking the smell, like the old-fashioned
person he was. The Curate walked round and round the grass-plats, sadly
enjoying this gentle indulgence. When he tossed the end away, after
nearly an hour of silent musing, he said to himself, ‘Mountford might do
it,’ with another sigh. It was hard upon Charley. A stranger had a
better chance than himself, a man that was nothing to her, whom she had
known for a few months only. But so it was: and it was noble of him that
he wished Mountford no manner of harm.
This was the state of affairs between the Rectory and the Dower-house,
which, fortunately, was on the very edge of Lilford parish, and
therefore could, without any searchings of heart on the part of the new
Vicar there, permit the attendance of the ladies at the church which
they loved. When Willie was home at Christmas his feet wore a distinct
line on the road. He was always there, which his brother thought foolish
and weak, since nothing could ever come of it. Indeed, if anything did
exasperate the Curate, it was the inordinate presumption and foolishness
of Willie, who seemed really to believe that Rose would have something
to say to him. _Rose!_ who was the rich one of the house, and whose eyes
were not magnanimous to observe humble merit like those of her sister.
It was setting that little thing up, Charley felt, with hot indignation,
as if she were superior to Anne. But then Willie was always more
complacent, and thought better of himself than did his humble-minded
brother. As for Mr. Ashley himself, he never intermitted his anxious
watch upon Anne. She was capable of it. No doubt she was just the very
person to do it. The Rector could not deny that she had provocation. If
a woman had behaved to him like that, he himself, he felt, might have
turned his back upon the sex, and refused to permit himself to become
the father of Charley and Willie. That was putting the case in a
practical point of view. The Rector felt a cold dew burst out upon his
forehead, when it gleamed across him with all the force of a revelation,
that in such a case Charley and Willie might never have been. He set out
on the spot to bring this tremendous thought before Anne, but stopped
short and came back after a moment depressed and toned down. How could
he point out to Anne the horrible chance that perhaps two such paragons
yet unborn might owe their non-existence (it was difficult to put it
into words even) to her? He could not say it; and thus lost out of
shyness or inaptness, he felt (for why should there have been any
difficulty in stating it?), by far the best argument that had yet
occurred to him. But though he relinquished his argument he did not get
over his anxiety. Anne an old maid! it was a thought to move heaven and
earth.
In the meantime Heathcote Mountford felt as warmly as anyone could have
desired the wonderful brightening of the local horizon which followed
upon the ladies’ return. The Dower-house was for him also within the
limits of a walk, and the decoration and furnishing which went on to a
great extent after they had taken possession, the family bivouacking
pleasantly in the meantime, accepting inconveniences with a composure
which only ladies are capable of under such circumstances, gave
opportunity for many a consultation and discussion. It was no obsequious
purpose of pleasing her which made Heathcote almost invariably agree
with Anne when questions arose. They were of a similar mould, born under
the same star, to speak poetically, with a natural direction of their
thoughts and fancies in the same channel, and an agreement of tastes
perhaps slightly owing to the mysterious affinities of the powerful and
wide-spreading family character which they both shared. By-and-by it
came to be recognised that Anne and Heathcote were each other’s natural
allies. One of them even, no one could remember which, playfully
identified a certain line of ideas as ‘our side.’ When the winter came
on and country pleasures shrank as they are apt to do, to women, within
much restricted limits, the friendship between these two elder members
of the family grew. That they were naturally on the same level, and
indeed about the same age, nobody entertained any doubt, aided by that
curious foregone conclusion in the general mind (which is either a
mighty compliment or a contemptuous insult to a woman) that a girl of
twenty-one is in reality quite the equal and contemporary, so to speak,
of a man of thirty-five. Perhaps the assumption was more legitimate than
usual in the case of these two; for Anne, always a girl of eager
intelligence and indiscriminate intellectual appetite, had lived much of
her life among books, and was used to unbounded intercourse with the
matured minds of great writers, besides having had the ripening touch of
practical work, and of that strange bewildering conflict with
difficulties unforeseen which is called disenchantment by some,
disappointment by others, but which is perhaps to a noble mind the most
certain and unfailing of all maturing influences. Heathcote Mountford
had not lived so much longer in the world without having known what that
experience was, and in her gropings darkly after the lost ideal, the
lost paradise which had seemed so certain and evident at her first
onset, Anne began to feel that now and then she encountered her
kinsman’s hand in the darkness with a reassuring grasp. This
consciousness came to her slowly, she could scarcely tell how; and
whether he himself was conscious of it at all she did not know. But let
nobody think this was in the way of love-making or overtures to a new
union. When a girl like Anne, a young woman full of fresh hope and
confidence and all belief in the good and true, meets on her outset into
life with such a ‘disappointment’ as people call it, it is not alone the
loss of her lover that moves her. She has lost her world as well. Her
feet stumble upon the dark mountains; the steadfast sky swims round her
in a confusion of bewildering vapours and sickening giddy lights. She
stands astonished in the midst of a universe going to pieces, like
Hamlet in those times which were out of joint. All that was so clear to
her has become dim. If she has a great courage, she fights her way
through the blinding mists, not knowing where she is going, feeling only
a dull necessity to keep upright, to hold fast to something. And if by
times a hand reaches hers thrust out into the darkness, guiding to this
side or that, her fingers close upon it with an instinct of
self-preservation. This, I suppose, is what used to be called catching a
heart in the rebound. Heathcote himself was not thinking of catching
this heart in its rebound. He was not himself aware when he helped her;
but he was dimly conscious of the pilgrimage she was making out of the
gloom back into the light.
This was going on all the winter through. Mr. Morris’s papers, and all
the harmonies or discordances of the furniture, and the struggle against
too much of Queen Anne, and the attempts to make some compromise that
could bear the name of Queen Victoria, afforded a dim amusement, a
background of trivial fact and reality which it was good to be able
always to make out among the mists. Love may perish, but the
willow-pattern remains. The foundation of the world may be shaken, but
so long as the dado is steady! Anne had humour enough to take the good
of all these helps, to smile, and then laugh, at all the dimly comic
elements around her, from the tremendous seriousness of the decorator,
up to the distress and perplexity of the Rector and his alarmed
perception of the possible old maid in her. Anne herself was not in the
least alarmed by the title which made Mr. Ashley shiver. The idea of
going over all that course of enchantment once again was impossible. It
had been enchantment once--a second time it would be--what would a
second time be? impossible! That was all that could be said. It was over
for her, as certainly as life of this kind is over for a widow. To be
sure it is not always over even for a widow: but Anne, highly
fantastical as became her temper and her years, rejected with a lofty
disdain any idea of renewal. Nevertheless, towards the spring, after the
darkness had begun to lighten a little, when she found at a hard corner
that metaphorical hand of Heathcote taking hers, helping her across a
bad bit of the road, her heart was conscious of a throb of pleasure.