AMY AMBER.
Some gentle crisis must have arrived in the history of Hester, for in
these days her heart was more sensitive and more sympathetic than ever
before. The circumvolant troubles of humanity caught upon it as it it
had been a thorn-bush, and hung there. It was not greatly troubled,
neither was its air murky, but its very repose was like a mother's sleep
which is no obstacle between the cries of her children and her
sheltering soul: it was ready to wake at every moan of the human sea
around her. Unlike most women, she had not needed marriage and
motherhood to open the great gate of her heart to her kind: I do not
mean there are not many like her in this. Why the tide of human
affection should have begun to rise so rapidly in her just at this time,
there is no need for conjecturing: much of every history must for the
long present remain inexplicable. No man creates his history any more
than he creates himself; he only modifies it--sometimes awfully; gathers
to him swift help, or makes intervention necessary. But the tide of
which I speak flowed yet more swiftly from the night of the magic
lantern. That experience had been as a mirror in which she saw the
misery of the low of her kind, including, alas! her brother Cornelius.
He had never before so plainly revealed to her his heartlessness, and
the painful consequence of the revelation was, that now, with all her
swelling love for human beings, she felt her heart shrink from him as if
he were of another nature. She could never indeed have loved him as she
did but that, being several years his elder, she had had a good deal to
do with him as baby and child: the infant motherhood of her heart had
gathered about him, and not an eternity of difference could after that
destroy the relation between them. But as he grew up, the boy had
undermined and weakened her affection, though hardly her devotion; and
now the youth had given it a rude shock. So far was she, however, from
yielding to this decay of feeling that it did not merely cause her much
pain but gave rise in her to much useless endeavor; while every day she
grew more anxious and careful to carry herself toward him as a sister
ought.
The Raymounts could not afford one of the best lodgings in Burcliff, and
were well contented with a floor in an old house in an unfashionable
part of the town, looking across the red roofs of the port, and out over
the flocks of Neptune's white sheep on the blue-gray German ocean. It
was kept by two old maids whose hearts had got flattened under the
pressure of poverty--no, I am wrong, it was not poverty, but
_care_; pure poverty never flattened any heart; it is the care
which poverty is supposed to justify that does the mischief; it gets
inside it and burrows, as well as lies on the top of it; of mere outside
poverty a heart can bear a mountainous weight without the smallest
injury, yea with inestimable result of the only riches. Our Lord never
mentions poverty as one of the obstructions to his kingdom, neither has
it ever proved such; riches, cares and desires he does mention. The
sisters Witherspin had never yet suffered from the lack of a single
necessary; not the less they frayed their mornings, wore out their
afternoons, scorched their evenings, and consumed their nights, in
scraping together provision for an old age they were destined never to
see. They were a small meager pair, with hardly a smile between them.
One waited and the other cooked. The one that waited had generally her
chin tied up with a silk handkerchief, as if she had come to life again,
but not quite, and could not do without the handkerchief. The other was
rarely seen, but her existence was all day testified by the odors that
ascended from the Tartarus of her ever-recurrent labors. It was a marvel
how from a region of such fumes could ascend the good dinners she
provided. The poor things of course had their weight on the mind of
Hester, for, had they tried, they could not have hidden the fact that
they lived to save: every movement almost, and certainly every tone
betrayed it. And yet, unlike so many lodging-house keepers, resembling
more the lion-ant than any other of the symbolic world of insects, they
were strictly honest. Had they not been, I doubt if Hester would have
been able, though they would then have needed more, to give them so much
pity as she did, for she had a great scorn of dishonesty. Her heart,
which was full of compassion for the yielding, the weak, the erring, was
not yet able to spend much on the actively vicious--the dishonest and
lying and traitorous. The honor she paid the honesty of these women
helped her much to pity the sunlessness of their existence, and the poor
end for which they lived. It looked as if God had forgotten
them--toiling for so little all day long, while the fact was they forgot
God, and were thus miserable and oppressed because they would not have
him interfere as he would so gladly have done. Instead of seeking the
kingdom of heaven, and trusting him for old age while they did their
work with their might, they exhausted their spiritual resources in
sending out armies of ravens with hardly a dove among them, to find and
secure a future still submerged in the waves of a friendly deluge. Nor
was Hester's own faith in God so vital yet as to propagate itself by
division in the minds she came in contact with. She could only be sorry
for them and kind to them.
The morning after the visit to the aquarium, woeful Miss Witherspin, as
Mark had epitheted her, entered to remove the ruins of breakfast with a
more sad and injured expression of countenance than usual. It was a
glorious day, and she was like a live shadow in the sunshine. Most of
the Raymounts were already in the open air, and Hester was the only one
in the room. The small, round-shouldered, cadaverous creature went
moving about the table with a motion that suggested bed as fitter than
labor, though she was strong enough to get through her work without more
than occasional suffering: if she could only have left pitying herself
and let God love her she would have got on well enough. Hester, who had
her own share of the same kind of fault, was rather moodily trimming her
mother's bonnet with a new ribbon, glancing up from which she at once
perceived that something in particular must have exceeded in wrongness
the general wrongness of things in the poor little gnome's world. Her
appearance was usually that of one with a headache; her expression this
morning suggested a mild indeed but all-pervading toothache.
"Is anything the matter, Miss Witherspin?" asked Hester.
"Indeed, miss, there never come nothing to sister and me but it's
matter, and now it's a sore matter. But it's the Lord's will and we
can't help it; and what are we here for but to have patience? That's
what I keep saying to my sister, but it don't seem to do her much good."
She ended with a great sigh; and Hester thought if the unseen sister
required the comfort of the one before her, whose evangel just uttered
was as gloomy as herself, how very unhappy she must be.
"No doubt we are here to learn patience," said Hester; "but I can hardly
think patience is what we are made for. Is there any fresh trouble--if
you will excuse me?"
"Well, I don't know, miss, as trouble can anyhow be called
fresh--leastways to us it's stale enough; we're that sick of it! I
declare to you, miss, I'm clean worn out with havin' patience! An' now
there's my sister gone after her husband an' left her girl, brought up
in her own way an' every other luxury, an' there she's come on our
hands, an' us to take the charge of her! It's a responsibility will be
the death of me."
"Is there no provision for her?"
"Oh, yes, there's provision! Her mother kep a shop for fancy goods at
Keswick--after John's death, that is--an' scraped together a good bit o'
money, they do say; but that's under trustees--not a penny to be touched
till the girl come of age!"
"But the trustees must make you a proper allowance for bringing her up!
And anyhow you can refuse the charge."
"No, miss, that we can't. It was always John's wish when he lay a dyin',
that if anything was to happen to Sarah, the child should come to us.
It's the trouble of the young thing, the responsibility--havin' to keep
your eyes upon her every blessed moment for fear she do the thing she
ought not to--that's what weighs upon me. Oh, yes, they'll pay so much a
quarter for her! it's not that. But to be always at the heels of a
young, sly puss after mischief--it's more'n I'm equal to, I do assure
you, Miss Raymount."
"When did you see her last?" inquired Hester.
"Not once have I set eyes on her since she was three years old!"
answered Miss Witherspin, and her tone seemed to imply in the fact yet
additional wrong.
"Then perhaps she may be wiser by this time," Hester suggested. "How old
is she now?"
"Sixteen out. It's awful to think of!"
"But how do you know she will be so troublesome? She mayn't want the
looking after you dread. You haven't seen her for thirteen years!"
"I'm sure of it. I know the breed, miss! She's took after her mother,
you may take your mortal oath! The sly way she got round our John!--an'
all to take him right away from his own family as bore and bred him! You
wouldn't believe it, miss!"
"Girls are not always like their mothers," said Hester. "I'm not half as
good as my mother."
"Bless you, miss! if she ain't half as bad as hers--the Lord have mercy
upon us! How I'm to attend to my lodgers and look after her, it's more
than I know how to think of it with patience."
"When is she coming?"
"She'll be here this blessed day as I'm speakin' to you, miss!"
"Perhaps, your house being full, you may find her a help instead of a
trouble. It won't be as if she had nothing to employ her!"
"There's no good to mortal creature i' the bones or blood of her!"
sighed Miss Witherspin, as she put the tablecloth on the top of the
breakfast-things.
That blessed day the girl did arrive--sprang into the house like a
rather loud sunbeam--loud for a sunbeam, not for a young woman of
sixteen. She was small, and bright, and gay, with large black eyes which
sparkled like little ones as well as gleamed like great ones, and a
miniature Greek face, containing a neat nose and a mouth the most
changeable ever seen--now a mere negation in red, and now long enough
for sorrow to couch on at her ease--only there was no sorrow near it,
nor in its motions and changes much of any other expression than mere
life. Her hair was a dead brown, mistakable for black, with a burnt
quality in it, and so curly, in parts so obstinately crinkly, as to
suggest wool--and negro blood from some far fount of tropic ardor. Her
figure was, if not essentially graceful yet thoroughly symmetrical, and
her head, hands and feet were small and well-shaped. Almost brought up
in her mother's shop, one much haunted by holiday-makers in the town,
she had as little shyness as forwardness, being at once fearless and
modest, gentle and merry, noiseless and swift--a pleasure to eyes,
nerves and mind. The sudden apparition of her in a rose-bud print, to
wait upon the Raymounts the next morning at breakfast, startled them all
with a sweet surprise. Every time she left the room the talk about her
broke out afresh, and Hester's information concerning her was a welcome
sop to the Cerberus of their astonishment. A more striking contrast than
that between her and her two aunts could hardly have been found in the
whole island. She was like a star between two gray clouds of twilight.
But she had not so much share in her own cheerfulness as her poor aunts
had in their misery. She so lived because she was so made. She was a joy
to others as well as to herself, but as yet she had no merit in her own
peace or its rippling gladness. So strong was the life in her that,
although she cried every night over the loss of her mother, she was
fresh as a daisy in the morning, opening like that to the sun of life,
and ready not merely to give smile for smile, but to give smile for
frown. In a word she was one of those lovely natures that need but to
recognize the eternal to fly to it straight; but on the other hand such
natures are in general very hard to wake to a recognition of the unseen.
They assent to every thing good, but for a long time seem unaware of the
need of a perfect Father. To have their minds opened to the truth, they
must suffer like other mortals less amiable. Suffering alone can develop
in such any spiritual insight, or cause them to care that there should
be a live God caring about them.
She was soon a favorite with every one of the family. Mrs. Raymount
often talked to her. And on her side Amy Amber, which name, being
neither crisp nor sparkling, but soft and mellow, did not seem quite to
suit her, was so much drawn to Hester that she never lost an opportunity
of waiting on her, and never once missed going to her room, to see if
she wanted anything, last of all before she went to bed. The only one of
the family that professed not to "think much of her," was the
contemptuous Cornelius. Even Vavasor, who soon became a frequent caller,
if he chanced to utter some admiring word concerning the pretty deft
creature that had just flitted from the room like a dark butterfly,
would not in reply draw from him more than a grunt and a half sneer. Yet
now and then he might have been caught glowering at her, and would
sometimes, seemingly in spite of himself, smile on her sudden
appearance.