The worst (or perhaps the best) of a temper so choleric as Mr.
Wesley's is that by constant daily expenditure on trifles it fatigues
itself, and is apt to betray its possessor by an unexpected lassitude
when a really serious occasion calls. A temper thoroughly cruel
(which his was not) steadily increases its appetite: but a temper
less than cruel, or cruel only by accident, will run itself to a
standstill and either cry for a strong whip or yield to the
temptation to defer the crisis.
On this Mrs. Wesley was building when she broke to her husband the
news of Hetty's return. He lifted himself in his chair, clutching
its arms. His face was gray with spent passion.
"Where is she?"
"She has gone for a walk, alone," she answered. She had, in truth,
packed Hetty off and watched her across the yard before venturing to
her husband's door.
"So best." He dropped back in his chair with a sigh that was more
than half composed of relief. "So best, perhaps. I will speak to
her later."
He looked at his wife with hopeless inquiry. She bowed her head for
sign that it was indeed hopeless.
Now Molly had sought her mother early and spoken up. But Molly (who
intended nothing so little) had not only made herself felt, for the
first time in her life, as a person to be reckoned with, but had also
done the most fatally foolish thing in her life by winding up with:
"And we--you and father and all of us, but father especially--have
driven her to it! God knows to what you will drive her yet: for she
has taken an oath under heaven to marry the first man who offers, and
she is capable of it, if you will not be sensible."
--Which was just the last thing Hetty would have forbidden her to
tell, yet just the last thing Hetty would have told, had she been
pleading for Molly. For Hetty had long since gauged her mother and
knew that, while her instinct for her sons' interests was well-nigh
impeccable, on any question that concerned her daughters she would
blunder nine times out of ten.
So now Mrs. Wesley, meaning no harm and foreseeing none, answered her
husband gravely, "She has told me nothing. But she swears she will
marry the first man who offers."
The Rector shut his mouth firmly. "That decides it," he answered.
"Has she gone in search of the fool?"
But this was merely a cry of bitterness. As Mrs. Wesley stole from
the room, he opened a drawer in his table, pulled out some sheets of
manuscript, and gazed at them for a while without fixing his
thoughts. He seldom considered his daughters. Women had their place
in the world: that place was to obey and bear children: to carry on
the line for men. It was a father's duty to take care that their
husbands should be good men, worthy of the admixture of good blood.
The family which yielded its daughters to this office yielded them as
its surplus. They did not carry on its name, which depended on its
sons. . . . He had three sons: but of all his daughters Hetty had
come nearest to claim a son's esteem. Something masculine in her
mind had encouraged him to teach her Latin and Greek. It had been an
experiment, half seriously undertaken; it had come to be seriously
pursued. Not even John had brought so flexible a sense of language.
In accuracy she could not compare with John, nor in that masculine
apprehension which seizes on logic even in the rudiments of grammar.
Mr. Wesley--a poet himself, though by no means a great one--had
sometimes found John too pragmatical in demanding reasons for this
and that. "Child," he had once protested, "you think to carry
everything by dint of argument; but you will find how little is ever
done in the world by close reasoning": and, turning to his wife in a
pet, "I profess, sweetheart, I think our Jack would not attend to the
most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for
it." To Hetty, on the other hand, beauty--beauty in language, in
music, in all forms of art, no less than the beauty of a spring day--
was an ultimate thing and lay beyond questions: and Mr. Wesley,
though as a divine he checked her somewhat pagan impulses and
recalled them to give account of their ground of choice, as a scholar
could not help admiring them. For they seldom led her to choose
wrongly. In Hetty dwelt something of the Attic instinct which, in
days of literary artifice and literary fashions from which she could
not wholly escape, kept her taste fresh and guided her at once to
browse on what was natural and health-giving and to reject with
delicate disgust what was rank and overblown. Himself a sardonic
humorist, he could enjoy the bubbling mirth with which she discovered
comedy in the objects of their common derision. Himself a hoplite in
study, laborious, without sense of proportion, he could look on and
smile while she, a woman, walked more nimbly, picking and choosing as
she went.
The manuscript he held was a poem of hers, scored with additions and
alterations of his own, by which (though mistakenly) he believed he
had improved it: a song of praise put in the mouth of a disciple of
Plato: its name, "Eupolis, his Hymn to the Creator." As he turned
the pages, his eyes paused and fastened themselves on a passage here
and there:
"Sole from sole Thou mak'st the sun
On his burning axles run:
The stars like dust around him fly,
And strew the area of the sky:
He drives so swift his race above,
Mortals can't perceive him move:
So smooth his course, oblique or straight,
Olympus shakes not with his weight.
As the Queen of solemn Night
Fills at his vase her orb of light--
Imparted lustre--thus we see
The solar virtue shines by Thee.
EIRESIONE! we'll no more
For its fancied aid implore,
Since bright _oil_ and _wool_ and _wine_
And life-sustaining _bread_ are Thine;
_Wine_ that sprightly mirth supplies,
Noble wine for sacrifice. . . ."
The verses, though he repeated them, had no meaning for him.
He remembered her sitting at the table by the window (now surrendered
to Johnny Whitelamb) and transcribing them into a fair copy, sitting
with head bent and the sunlight playing on her red-brown hair: he
remembered her standing by his chair with a flushed face, waiting for
his verdict. But though his memory retained these visions, they
carried no sentiment. He only thought of the young, almost boyish,
promise in the lines:
"Omen, monster, prodigy!
Or nothing is, or Jove, from thee.
Whether various Nature's play,
Or she, renversed, thy will obey,
And to rebel man declare
Famine, plague or wasteful war . . .
No evil can from Thee proceed;
'Tis only suffered, not decreed. . . ."
He gazed from the careful handwriting to the horizon beyond his
window. Why had he fished out the poem from its drawer? She, the
writer--his child--was a wanton.