It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance
as to whip the fog.--GEORGE ELIOT.
The children, who had reached the pear stage, looked with round, awed
eyes at "Auntie Hester" as she sat down at the luncheon-table beside the
black bottle which marked her place. The Gresleys were ardent total
abstainers, and were of opinion that Hester's health would be greatly
benefited by following their example. But Hester's doctor differed from
them--he was extremely obstinate--with the result that the Gresleys were
obliged to tolerate the obnoxious bottle on their very table. It was
what Mrs. Gresley called a "cross," and Mr. Gresley was always afraid
that the fact of its presence might become known and hopelessly
misconstrued in Warpington and the world at large.
The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to
eat the congealed slice of roast mutton, with blue slides in it, which
had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent
out for the servants' dinner. The children liked "Auntie Hester," but
without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself.
She could tell them stories, and make butterflies and horses and dogs
out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the
delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired
directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large,
good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did
not play fair, so much so that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to
interfere, and to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would
be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually
finding fault with them.
Perhaps nothing in her life at the Vicarage was a greater trial to
Hester than to see the rules of fair play broken by the children with
the connivance of their parents. Mr. Gresley had never been to a public
school, and had thus missed the ABC of what in its later stages is
called "honor." He was an admirable hockey-player, but he was not in
request at the frequent Slumberleigh matches, for he never hit off fair,
or minded being told so.
"Auntie Hester is leaving all her fat," said Mary, suddenly, in a shrill
voice, her portion of pear held in her left cheek as she spoke. She had
no idea that she ought not to draw attention to the weakness of others.
She was only anxious to be the first to offer interesting information.
"Never mind," said Mrs. Gresley, admiring her own moderation. "Finish
your pear."
If there was one thing more than another in Hester's behavior that
annoyed Mrs. Gresley--and there were several others--it was Hester's
manner of turning her food over on her plate and leaving half of it.
Hester did it again now, and Mrs. Gresley, already irritated by her
unpunctuality, tried to look away so as not to see her, and prayed for
patience. The hundred a year which Hester contributed to the little
establishment had eased the struggling household in many ways; but Mrs.
Gresley sometimes wondered if the money, greatly needed as it was,
counterbalanced the perpetual friction of her sister-in-law's presence.
"Father!"
"Yes, my son."
"Isn't it wrong to drink wine?"
Yes, my son."
"Then why does Auntie Hester drink it?"
Hester fixed her eyes intently on her brother. Would he uphold her
before the children?
"Because she thinks it does her good," said Mr. Gresley.
She withdrew her eyes. Her hand, holding a spoonful of cold rice
pudding, shook. A delicate color flooded her face, and finally settled
in the tip of her nose. In her own way she loved the children.
"Ach, mein Herr," almost screamed Fräulein, who adored Hester, and saw
the gravity of the occasion, "aber Sie vergessen that the Herr Doctor
Br-r-r-r-r-own has so strong--so very strong command--"
"I cannot allow a discussion as to the merits or demerits of alcohol at
my table," said Mr. Gresley. "I hold one opinion, Dr. Brown holds
another. I must beg to be allowed to differ from him. Children, say
grace."
* * * * *
It was Wednesday and a half-holiday, and Mrs. Gresley had arranged to
take the children in the pony-carriage to be measured for new boots.
These expeditions to Westhope were a great event. At two o'clock exactly
the three children rushed down-stairs, Regie bearing in his hand his tin
money-box, in which a single coin could be heard to leap. Hester
produced a bright threepenny-piece for each child, one of which was
irretrievably buried in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately
lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and
slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started,
accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow-and-white dog of French
extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a
certain hurried arrogance about his hind-legs, but it was only manner.
He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear their
tails high.
Hester saw them drive off, and a few minutes later Mr. Gresley started
on his bicycle for a ruridecanal chapter meeting in the opposite
direction. She heard the Vicarage gate "clink" behind him as she crossed
the little hall, and then she suddenly stopped short and wrung her
hands. She had forgotten to tell either of them that the Bishop of
Southminster was going to call that afternoon. She knew he was coming on
purpose to see her, but this would have been incredible to the
Gresleys. She had not read Rachel's letter announcing his coming till
she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her
mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had
caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the
subject till this moment.
She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune
frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see
the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical
coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each
side of the back wheel.
Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry
with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said
to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my
own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and leaned her
head against the banisters.
To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fräulein, who
had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit-lamp, and
now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two
thin slices of bread-and-butter.
"You are all goodness, Fräulein," said Hester, raising her small,
haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much
trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only
shape in which Fräulein could express her silent sympathy. So she
accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly
severe Fräulein watching every mouthful.
Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was
finished. There were breaks in the clouds, after all. Rachel was coming
to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fräulein often said, "easy
cast down and easy cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up"
once more. She kissed Fräulein and ran up to her room, where she
divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the
road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the
little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush
after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await
her friend in the drawing-room.
Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her
sister-in-law's only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular
haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful
familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if
they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat
impossible.
The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the
neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in
"their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn
Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes
dropped people as quickly as they took them up."
Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its
inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were
neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs.
Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her
lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed
at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her
leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their
Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger
brothers--with whom they were not acquainted--as Jack and Harry, though
they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.
When, after her aunt's death, she had, by the advice of her few
remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his
account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she
journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any
rate, she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in
Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus's time, for whom
she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where
she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire
houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well,
but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the
existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing
at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by
the fact that she was her brother's sister.
Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong
to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but
he had evidently, though involuntarily, adopted it for better for worse;
perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find
companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice
and a tendency to monologue checkered by prehistoric jokes and tortured
puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries
about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the
first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.
She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous
opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for
Hester's thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered
circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself
nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask
curtain.
So far, during the eight years since she had left the school-room, she
had always been "Miss Gresley," a little personage treated with
consideration wherever she went, and _choyée_ for her delicate humor and
talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation,
as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and
she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also
grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and
then indignant at hearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity
far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the
latter--without being acquainted with them except officially--as "fine,"
as caring only for "London people," and as being "tuft-hunters," because
they frequently entertained at their houses persons of rank, to half of
whom they were related. All this was new to Hester. She discovered that,
though she might pay visits at these houses, she must never mention
them, as it was considered the height of vulgarity to speak of people of
rank.
Mrs. Gresley, who had been quite taken aback when the first of these
invitations came, felt it her duty to warn Hester against a love of
rank, reminding her that it was a very bad thing to get a name for
running after titled people.
"James and I have always kept clear of that," she remarked, with
dignity. "For my part, I dare say you will think me very old-fashioned,
but I must own I never can see that people with titles or wealth are one
bit nicer or pleasanter than those without them."
Hester agreed.
"And," continued Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be
independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is
because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the
hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title
to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them as I do now."
If Lady Susan Gresley had passed her acquaintance through a less
exclusive sieve, Hester might have had the advantage of hearing all
these well-worn sentiments, and of realizing the point of view of a
large number of her fellow-creatures before she became an inconspicuous
unit in their midst.
But if Mrs. Gresley was pained by Hester's predilection for the society
of what she called "swells" (the word, though quite extinct in civilized
parts, can occasionally be found in country districts), she was still
more pained by the friendships Hester formed with persons whom her
sister-in-law considered "not quite."
Mrs. Gresley was always perfectly civil, and the Pratts imperfectly so,
to Miss Brown, the doctor's invalid sister. But Hester made friends with
her, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Gresley that kindness was one
thing and intimacy another.
"The truth is," Mrs. Gresley would say, "Hester loves adulation, and as
she can't get it from the Pratts and us, she has to go to those below
her in the social scale, like Miss Brown, who will give it to her. Miss
Brown may be very cultivated. I dare say she is, but she makes up to
Hester."
Sybell Loftus, who lived close at hand at Wilderleigh, across the Prone,
was one of the very few besides Miss Brown among her new acquaintances
who hailed Hester at once as a kindred spirit, to the unconcealed
surprise of the Pratts and the Gresleys. Sybell adored Hester's book,
which the Gresleys and Pratts considered rather peculiar "as emanating
from the pen of a clergyman's sister." She enthusiastically suggested to
Hester several improvements which might easily be made in it, which
would have changed its character altogether. She even intrenched on the
sacred precinct of a married woman's time to write out the openings of
several romances, which she was sure Hester, with her wonderful talent,
could build up into magnificent works of art. She was always running
over to the Vicarage to confide to Hester the unique thoughts which had
been vouchsafed to her while contemplating a rose, or her child, or her
husband, or all three together.
Hester was half amused, half fascinated, and ruefully lost many of the
mornings still left her by the Pratts and Gresleys in listening to the
outpourings of this butterfly soul, which imagined every flower it
involuntarily alighted on and drew honey from to be its own special
production.
But Hester's greatest friend in Middleshire was the Bishop of
Southminster, with whom Rachel was staying, and whom she was expecting
this afternoon.