The depth and dream of my desire,
The bitter paths wherein I stray,
Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire,
Thou knowest Who hast made the clay!
--RUDYARD KIPLING.
The unbalanced joys and sorrows of emotional natures are apt to arouse
the pity of the narrow-hearted and the mild contempt of the obtuse of
their fellow-creatures.
But perhaps it is a mistake to feel compassion for persons like Hester,
for if they have many evil days and weeks in their usually short lives,
they have also moments of sheer bliss, hours of awed contemplation and
of exquisite rapture which, possibly, in the long run, equal the more
solid joys of a good income and a good digestion, nay, even the
perennial glow of that happiest of happy temperaments which limits the
nature of others by its own, which sees no uncomfortable difference
between a moral and a legal right, and believes it can measure life with
the same admirable accuracy with which it measures its drawing-room
curtains.
As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel's
faithful, doglike eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester's dancing,
mischievous ones. They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on
his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the
Vicarage on his way back.
Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself,
and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she
described "not wisely but too well." But she was faithful to her salt.
She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have
objected had they been present. Indeed, she spoke of them in what they
would have termed "a very proper manner," of their kindness to her when
she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her
breakfast-tray every morning, and how, in the spring, he had taught her
to bicycle.
"But, oh! Rachel," added Hester, "during the last nine months my
self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill
the poor creature. My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself
of which I never dreamed. I feel as if I had been ironed all over since
I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out
clear in the process."
"I am quite alarmed," said Rachel, tranquilly.
"You ought to be. First of all I did think I cared nothing about food. I
don't remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan.
But here I--I am difficult about it. I do try to eat it, but often I
really can't. And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting
habit, which always offends me in other people. Now I am as bad as any
of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very
rich."
"I suppose the cooking is vile?"
"I don't know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can't
judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I
should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna
never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must."
Rachel looked critically at Hester's innocent, childlike face. When
Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There
was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face
and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint color
in her cheek had a violet tinge.
She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw plainly enough
that Hester's weak health was slipping further down the hill.
"And all this time you have been working?"
"If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now.
Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant
discovery about myself--that I have the temper of a fiend if I am
interrupted."
"But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not
be interrupted at certain hours?"
"I did. I did. But, of course--it is very natural--they think that
rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel.
And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And
the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings."
"Who on earth are the Pratts?"
"They are what _they_ call 'county people.' Their father made a fortune
in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years
ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I
never would dance with him. He used to come to our 'At Homes,' but he
was never asked to dinner. He is a great 'parti' among a certain set
down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but
I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and
called 'Hessie,' which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid
I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it
seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you
like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James's and
Minna's greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of
course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they
came up to my room to what they called 'rout me out,' though I had told
them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and
when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people
in the book were real just then. And then when I recognized them, and
the scene in my mind which I had been waiting for for weeks was
shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly.
And then--I was so ashamed afterwards--I burst into tears of rage and
despair."
Even the remembrance was too much. Hester wiped away two large tears
onto a dear little handkerchief just large enough to receive them, and
went on with a quaver in her voice.
"I was so shocked at myself that I found it quite easy to tell them next
day that I was sorry I had lost my temper; but they have not been the
same since. Not that I wanted them to be the same. I would rather they
were different. But I was anxious to keep on cordial terms with Minna's
friends. She quarrels with them herself, but that is different. I
suppose it is inevitable if you are on terms of great intimacy with
people you don't really care for."
"At any rate, _they_ have not interrupted you again?"
"N--no. But still, I was often interrupted. Minna has too much to do,
and she is not strong just now, and she often sends up one of the
children, and I was so nearly fierce with one of them--poor little
things!--that I felt the risk was becoming too great, so I have left off
writing between breakfast and luncheon, and I get up directly it is
light instead. It is light very early now. Only the worst part of it is
that I am so tired for the rest of the day that I can hardly drag myself
about."
Rachel said nothing. She seldom commented on the confidences that were
made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an
enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail
disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like
a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further
by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not
know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes
are holden.
"And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?"
Hester's face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically she talked to
her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover.
Everything else was forgotten. Hester's eyes burned. Her color came and
went. She was transfigured.
The protecting, anxious affection died out of Rachel's face as she
looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half-envious
admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself,
years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation
while they lasted; and afterwards, as a steep step--a very steep
step--upon the stair of life. But she realized now that such as Hester
live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only
enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the
gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed
to level their ridicule and contempt.
Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some
mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it
complete, beautiful--an entrancing vision, inaccessible, as a sunset.
"I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try
to write it, it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of
charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labor day by day travestying
it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make
everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone
into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And
gradually I understand and know. And I listen, and Nature speaks, really
speaks--not a _façon de parler_, as some people think who explain to you
that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean--and her
spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again
misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander
so far away from her that every white anemone and every seedling fern
disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among
them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the
night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or,
if there are, I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some
coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And, oh! Rachel, the
worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have
been, when the vision fades, I know I shall _admire_ what I have
written. It is that that breaks my heart."
The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in
the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel
understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester
idealized Nature, as she idealized her fellow-creatures, as she
idealized everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in
despair because she could not speak adequately of Life or Nature as she
saw them. Rachel thought, with bewilderment, that that was just what she
could do.
At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long
interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be
distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling "Hemma" to a sense
of duty from the back yard, "Hemma" breathlessly ushered in the Bishop
of Southminster.