Hetty had found a patch of ragged turf and mallow where the woodstack
hid her from the parsonage windows; and sat there in the morning
sun--unconsciously, as usual, courting its full rays. Between her
and the stack the ground was bare, strewn with straw and broken
twigs. She supposed that her father would send for her soon: but she
was preparing no defence, no excuses. She hoped, indeed, that the
interview would be short, but simply because the account she must
render to him seemed trivial beside that which she must render to
herself. Her eyes watched the hens as they scratched pits in the
warm dust, snuggled down and adjusted and readjusted their
wing-feathers. But her brain was busied over and over with the same
thought--"I am now a bad woman. Is there yet any way for me to be
good?"
Yet her wits were alert enough. She heard her father's footstep on
the path twenty yards away, guessed the moment which would bring him
into sight of her. Though she did not look up, she knew that he had
come to a halt. She waited. He turned and walked slowly away.
She knew why he had faltered. Her mind ran back to the problem.
"I am a bad woman. Is there any way for me to be good?"
Half an hour passed. Emilia came round the rick, talking to herself,
holding a wooden bowl from which she had been feeding the chickens.
She came upon Hetty unawares and stood still, with a face at first
confused, but gradually hardening.
"Sit down, Emmy." Hetty pointed to a faggot lying a few paces off.
Emilia hesitated.
"You may sit down: near enough to listen--"
'Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, let Emmy bow to it.'
"You were reciting as you came along." She raised her eyes with a
grave smile. "Shall I tell you your secret?"
"What secret?" asked Emilia, reddening in spite of herself.
"Oh, I have known it a long while! But if you want me to whisper it,
you must come closer. Nay, my dear, I know very little of the
stage--perhaps as little as you: but, from what I have read, it will
bring you close to creatures worse than I."
Emilia was scared now. "Who told you? Have you heard from Jacky?--
no, he couldn't, because--"
"--Because you never told him, although you may have hinted at it.
And if you told him, he would laugh and call it the ambition of a
girl who knows nothing of the world."
"I will not starve here. And now that this--this disgrace--"
"Father would think it no less disgrace to see you an actress.
Listen: a little while ago he came this way, meaning to curse me, but
he turned back and did not. And now you come, and are confused, and
I read you just as plainly. While my wits are so clear I want to say
one or two things to you. Yesterday--only yesterday--I left home for
ever, and here I am back again. I have been wicked, you say, and
there is nothing sinful in becoming an actress. Perhaps not: yet I
am sure father would think it sinful--even more selfishly sinful than
my fault, because it would hurt the careers of Jacky and Charles; and
that, as you know, he would never forgive."
"Who are you, to be lecturing me?"
"I am your sister, who has done wrong: I have tasted bitter fruit and
must go eating it all my life. But it is fruit of knowledge--ah,
listen, Emmy! If you do this and become famous, the greater your
fame, the greater the injury; or so father would hold it, and perhaps
our brothers too. Hetty can be hidden and forgotten in a far country
parish. But can Jacky become a bishop, having an actress for
sister?"
"You are sudden in this thought for your brothers."
"It is not of them I am thinking. I say that if you succeed you will
lose father's forgiveness and always carry with you this sorrowful
knowledge. Yet I would bid you go and do it; for to be great is
worth much cost of sorrow, and sorrow might even increase your
greatness. But have you that strength? And if you should not
succeed?--We know nothing of the world: all our thoughts of it come
out of books and dreaming. You imagine yourself treading the boards
and holding all hearts captive with your voice. So I used to imagine
myself slaying dragons. So, only yesterday, I believed--"
She sat erect with a shiver. "To wake and find all your dreams
changed to squalor, and for you no turning back! Have you the
strength, Emmy--to go forward and change that squalor back again by
sheer force into beautiful dreams? Have you the strength?"
She gazed at Emilia and added musingly, "No, you have not the
strength. You will stay on here in the cage, an obedient woman, your
talent repressed to feed the future of those grand brothers of ours
who take all we give, yet cannot help us one whit. They take it
innocently; they do not know; and they are dear good fellows.
But they cannot help. I only have done what may injure them--though
I do not think it will: and when father came along the path just now,
he was thinking of them rather than of me--of me only as I might
injure them."
She was right indeed. Mr. Wesley had left the house thinking of her:
but a few steps had called up the faces of his sons, and by habit,
since he thought of them always on his walks. His studies put aside,
to think of them was his one recreation. Coming upon Hetty, he had
felt himself taken at unawares, and retreated.
"--And when he turned away," Hetty went on, "I understood. And I
felt sorry for him; because all of a sudden it came to me that he may
be wiser than any of us, and one day it will be made plain to us,
what we have helped to do--or to spoil."
"Here is someone you had better be sorry for," said Emilia, glancing
along the path at the sound of footsteps and catching sight of Nancy.
"She has made up her mind that John Lambert will have no more to do
with us now; and the wedding not a month away!"
Sure enough, Nancy's eyes were red, and she gazed at Hetty less with
reprobation than with lugubrious reproach.
"Then she knows less of John Lambert than I do," said Hetty; "and
still less how deep he is in love with her. Nancy dear," she asked,
"was he to have walked over this morning?"
"He was coming from Haxey way," wailed Nancy. "He was to have been
here at ten o'clock and it is past that now. Of course he has heard,
and does not mean to come."
Hetty choked down an exceeding bitter sob.
"Anne--sister Anne," she answered in her old light manner, though she
desired to be alone and to weep: "go, look along the road and say if
you see anyone coming!"
Nancy turned away, too generous to upbraid her sister, but hotly
ashamed of her and her lack of contrition, and indignantly sorry for
herself. Nevertheless she went towards the gate whence she could see
along the road.
"It seems to me," said Emilia, "that you are scarcely awake yet to
your--your situation."
She was trying to recover her superiority, which Hetty had shaken by
guessing her secret.
"Oh, yes I am," Hetty answered. "But my time may be short for
talking: so I use what ways I can to make my sisters listen. Hark!"
"He is coming!" Nancy announced, running towards them from the gate.
Honest love shone in her eyes. "He is coming--and there is someone
with him!"
"Who?" asked Emilia. Hetty's eyes put the same question, far more
eagerly. She rose up: her face was white.
"I don't know. He--they--are half a mile away. Yet I seem to know
the figure. It is odd now--"
Hetty put out a hand and leaned it against the wood-stack to steady
herself. The sharpened end of a stake pierced her palm, but she did
not feel it.
"Is it--is it--" Her lips worked and formed the words, inaudibly.
"Run and look again," commanded Emilia.
But Hetty turned and walked swiftly away. Could it be _he_? No--and
yet why not? Until this moment she had not known how much she built
upon that chance. She loved him still: at the bottom of her heart
most tenderly. She had reproached herself, saying that her desire
for him had nothing to do with love--was no genuine impulse to
forgive, but a selfish cowardly longing to be saved, as only he could
save her. She was wrong. She desired to be saved: but she desired
far more wildly that he should play the man, justify her love and
earn forgiveness. She had--and was, alas! to prove it--an almost
infinite capacity to forgive. She, Hetty, of the reckless wit and
tongue--she would meet him humbly--as one whose sin had been as deep
as his . . .
Was it he? If so, she would beg his pardon for thoughts which had
accused him of cowardice. . . .
She could not wait for the truth. So much joy it would bring, or so
deep anguish. She walked away blindly towards the fields, not once
looking back.
"So there you're hiding!" cried John Lambert triumphantly, saluting
Nancy with a smacking kiss on either cheek, and in no way
disconcerted by Emilia's presence.
Nancy pushed him away, but half-heartedly.
"No, you mustn't!" she protested, and her face grew suddenly tragic.
"Oh, I forgot for the moment!" John Lambert tried to look doleful.
He was an energetic young land-surveyor, with tow-coloured hair and a
face incurably jolly.
"You have heard, then?" asked Emilia.
"Why, bless you, your father was around to see me at eight o'clock
yesterday morning, or some such hour. He must have saddled at once.
He's a stickler, is the Rector. 'Young Mr. Lambert,' says he, very
formal, or some such words, 'I regret to say I must retract my
permission that you should marry into my family, as doubtless you
will wish to be released of your troth.' 'Hallo!' says I, a bit
surprised, but knowing his crotchets: 'Why, what have I been doing?'
'Nothing,' says he. 'Then what has _she_ been up to?'"--this with a
wink at Emilia--"'Nothing,' says he again, and pours out the whole
story, or so much of it as he knew and guessed, and winds up with
'I release you,' and a bow very formal and stiff. 'How about Miss
Nancy?' I asked; 'does she release me too?' 'I haven't asked her,'
he says, and goes on that he is not in the habit of being guided by
his daughters. To which I replied: 'Well, I am--by one of 'em,
anyhow--or hope to be. And, if you don't mind, I'll step round
to-morrow at the hour she expects me. I'd do it this moment if I
hadn't a job at Bawtry. And I'm sorry for you, Rector,' I said,
'but if you think it makes a penn'orth of difference to me apart from
that, you're mistaken.' And so we parted."
"Have you thought of the consequences?" Nancy demanded, tearful, but
obviously worshipping this very ordinary young man.
"No, I haven't."
"She is back again."
"Oh, is she? Then she found him out quick. Poor Hetty! She must be
in a taking too!" His face expressed commiseration for a moment, but
with an effort, and sprang back to jollity as a bow is released from
its cord. "Curious, how quickly a bit of news like that gets about!
I picked up with a man on the road--said his name was Wright and he
comes from Lincoln--a decent fellow--tradesman--plumber, I think.
At all events he knows a deal about you, and began, after a while,
pumping me about your sister. I saw in a moment that he had heard
something, and gave him precious little change for his money.
Talked as if he knew more than I did, if only he cared to tell: but
of course I didn't encourage him."
"Wright?--a plumber from Lincoln?" Emilia faltered, and her eyes met
Nancy's.
"That's it. He had business with your father, he said. In fact I
left him on his way to knock at the door."
The two sisters remembered the man on the knoll, and his bill.
They were used to duns.
Emilia's eye signalled that John Lambert was to be kept away from the
house at all costs; nor did she breathe freely until she saw the
lovers crossing the fields arm-in-arm.