COURTSHIP IN EARNEST.
I do not care to dwell upon what followed. Christmas was a merry day to
all but the major, who did not like the engagement any better than
before. He found refuge and consolation with Mark. The boy was merry in
a mild, reflected way, because the rest were merry, but preferred his
own room with "dear Majie," to the drawing-room with the grand lady. He
would steal from it, assured that in a moment the major would be after
him, to keep him company, and tell him such stories!
Lord Gartley now began to make love with full intent and purpose. "How
could she listen to him!" says this and that reader? I can but echo the
exclamation, "How could she!" To explain the thing is more than I am
bound to undertake. As I may have said twenty times before, how this
woman will have this man is one of the deeper mysteries of the
world--yea, of the maker of the world, perhaps. One thing I may fairly
suggest--that where men see no reason why a woman should love this or
that man, she may see something in him which they do not see, or do not
value as she does. Alas for her if she only imagines it! Another thing
we may be sure of--that in few cases does the woman see what the men
know: much of that which is manifest to the eyes of the male world, is
by the male world scrupulously hidden from the female. One thing more I
would touch upon which men are more likely never to have thought of than
to have forgotten: that the love which a beautiful woman gives a man, is
in itself not an atom more precious than that which a plain woman gives.
In the two hearts they are the same, if the hearts be like; if not, the
advantage may well be with the plain woman. The love of a beautiful
woman is no more thrown away than the love of the plainest. The same
holds with regard to women of differing intellectual developments or
endowment. But when a woman of high hopes and aims--a woman filled with
eternal aspirations after life, and unity with her divine original gives
herself to such a one as lord Gartley, I cannot help thinking she must
have seriously mistaken some things both in him and in herself, the
consequence, probably, of some self-sufficiency, ambition, or other
fault in her, which requires the correction of suffering.
Hester found her lover now very pleasant. If sometimes he struck a
jarring chord, she was always able to find some way of accounting for
it, or explaining it away--if not entirely to her satisfaction, yet so
far that she was able to go on hoping everything, and for the present to
put off any further consideration of the particular phenomenon to the
time when, like most self-deceiving women, she _scarcely_ doubted
she would have greater influence over him--namely, the time when, man
and wife, they would be one flesh. But where there is not already a far
deeper unity than marriage can give, marriage itself can do little to
bring two souls together--may do much to drive them asunder.
She began to put him in training, as she thought, for the help he was to
give her with her loved poor. "What a silly!" exclaims a common-minded
girl-reader. "That was not the way to land her fish!" But let those who
are content to have fishy husbands, net or hook and land them as they
can; a woman has more in herself than any husband can give her, though
he may take much from her. Lord Gartley had no real conception of her
outlook on life, and regarded all her endeavor as born of the desire to
perfect his voice and singing. With such teaching he must, he imagined,
soon become her worthy equal. He had no notion of the sort of thing
genius is. Few have. They think of it as something supreme in itself,
whereas it is altogether dependent on truth in the inward parts. It may
last for a time separated from truth, but it dies its life, not lives
it. Its utterance depends on enthusiasm; all enthusiasm depends on love
and nobility of purpose; and love and nobility depend upon truth--that
is, live truth. Not millions of years, without an utter regeneration of
nature, could make such a man as Gartley sing like Hester. His faculties
were in the power of decay, therefore of the things that pass; Hester
was of the powers that give life, and keep things going and growing. She
sang because of the song that was in her soul. Her music came out of her
being, not out of her brain and her throat. If such a one as Gartley can
sing, there is no reason why he should be kept singing. In all the arts
the man who does not reach to higher things falls away from the things
he has. The love of money will ruin poet, painter, or musician.
For Hester the days now passed in pleasure. I fear the closer contact
with lord Gartley, different he was in her thought from what he was in
his own best, influenced at least the _rate_ of her growth towards
the upper regions. We cannot be heart and soul and self in the company
of the evil--and the untrue is the evil, however beheld as an angel of
light in the mirage of our loving eyes, without sad loss. Her prayers
were not so fervent, her aspirations not so strong. I see again the curl
on the lip of a certain kind of girl-reader! Her judgment here is but
foolishness. She is much too low in the creation yet, be she as
high-born and beautiful as a heathen goddess, to understand the things
of which I am writing. But she has got to understand them--they are not
mine--and the understanding may come in dread pain, and dire dismay.
Hester was one of those who in their chambers are not alone, but with
him who seeth in secret; and not to get so near to God in her chamber--I
can but speak in human figure--did not argue well for the new
relationship. But the Lord is mindful of his own. He does not forget
because we forget. Horror and pain may come, but not because he
forgets--nay, just because he does not forget. That is a thing God never
does.
There are many women who would have bewitched Gartley more, yet great
was his delight in the presence and converse of Hester, and he yielded
himself with pleasing grace. Inclined to rebel at times when wearied
with her demands on his attention and endeavour, he yet condescended to
them with something of the playfulness with which one would humour a
child: he would have a sweet revenge by and by! His turn would come
soon, and he would have to instruct her in many things she was now
ignorant of! She had never moved in his great world: he must teach her
its laws, instruct her how to shine, how to make the most of herself,
how to do honour to his choice! He had but the vaguest idea of the
_folly_ that possessed her. He thought of her relation to the poor
but as a passing--indeed a past phase of a hitherto objectless life.
Anything beyond a little easy benevolence would be impossible to the
wife of lord Gartley! That she should contemplate the pursuit of her
former objects with even greater freedom and devotion than before, would
have seemed to him a thing utterly incredible. And Hester would have
been equally staggered to find he had so failed to understand her after
the way she had opened her heart to him. To imagine that for anything
she would forsake the work she had been sent to do! So things went on
_upon a mutual misunderstanding_--to make a bull for my purpose--each
in the common meaning of the word getting more and more in love with
the other every day, while in reality they were separating farther and
farther, in as much as each one was revelling in thoughts that were
alien to the other. An occasional blasting doubt would cross the mind
of Hester, but she banished it like an evil spectre.
Miss Vavasor continued the most pleasant and unexacting of guests. Her
perfect breeding, sustained by a quiet temper and kindly disposition,
was easily, by simple hearts, taken for the sweetness it only simulated.
To people like Miss Vavasor does the thought never occur--what if the
thing they find it so necessary to simulate should actually in itself be
indispensable? What if their necessity of simulating it comes of its
absolute necessity!
She found the company of the major agreeable in the slow time she had
for her nephew's sake to pass with such primitive people, and was glad
of what she might otherwise have counted barely endurable. For Mr.
Raymount, he would not leave what he counted his work for any goddess in
creation: Hester had got her fixedness of purpose through him, and its
direction through her mother. But it was well he did not give Miss
Vavasor much of his company: if they had been alone together for a
quarter of an hour, they would have parted sworn foes, hating each other
almost as much as is possible without having loved. So the major,
instead of putting a stop to the unworthy alliance, found himself
actually furthering the affair, doing his part with the lady on whom the
success of the enemy depended. He was still now and then tempted to
break through and have a hideous revenge; but, with no great sense of
personal dignity to restrain him, he was really a man of honour and
behaved like one, curbing himself with no little severity.
So the time went on till after the twelfth night, when Miss Vavasor took
her leave for a round of visits, and lord Gartley went up to town, with
intention thereafter to pay a visit to his property, such as it was. He
would return to Yrndale in three weeks or a month, when the final
arrangements for the marriage would be made.
A correspondence naturally commenced, and Hester, unwarned by former
experience, received his first letter joyfully. But, the letter read,
lo, there was the same disappointment as of old! And as the first
letter, so the last and all between. In Hester's presence, she
suggesting and leading, he would utter what seemed to indicate the
presence of what she would have in him; but alone in his room, without
guide to his thoughts, without the stimulus of her presence or the sense
of her moral atmosphere, the best things he could write were poor
enough; they had no bones in them, and no other fire than that which the
thought of Hester's loveliness could supply. So his letters were not
inspiriting. They absorbed her atmosphere and after each followed a
period of mental asphyxy. Had they been those of a person indifferent to
her, she would have called them stupid, thrown them down, and thought no
more of them. As it was, I doubt if she read many of them twice over.
But all would be well, she said to herself, when they met again. It was
her absence that oppressed him, poor fellow! He was out of spirits, and
could not write! He had not the faculty for writing that some had! Her
father had told her of men that were excellent talkers, but set them
down pen in hand and not a thought would come! Was it not to his praise
rather than blame? Was not the presence of a man's own kind the best
inspirer of his speech? It was his loving human nature--she would have
persuaded herself, but never quite succeeded--that made utterance in a
letter impossible to him. Yet she _would_ have liked a little
genuine, definite response to the things she wrote! He seemed to have
nothing to say from himself! He would assent and echo, but any response
was always such as to make her doubt whether she had written plainly,
invariably suggesting things of this world and not of the unseen, the
world of thought and being. And when she mentioned work he always
replied as if she meant an undefined something called _doing good_.
He never doubted the failure of that foolish concert of ladies and
gentlemen given to the riff-raff of London, had taught her that whether
man be equal in the sight of God or not, any attempt on the part of
their natural superiors to treat them as such could not but be
disastrous.