THE WEDDING-DRESS.
For all her troubles, however, Mary had her pleasures, even in the
shop. It was a delight to receive the friendly greetings of such as had
known and honored her father. She had the pleasure, as real as it was
simple, of pure service, reaping the fruit of the earth in the joy of
the work that was given her to do; there is no true work that does not
carry its reward though there are few that do not drop it and lose it.
She gathered also the pleasure of seeing and talking with people whose
manners and speech were of finer grain and tone than those about her.
When Hesper Mortimer entered the shop, she brought with her delight;
her carriage was like the gait of an ode; her motions were rhythm; and
her speech was music. Her smile was light, and her whole presence an
enchantment to Mary. The reading aloud which Wardour had led her to
practice had taught her much, not only in respect of the delicacies of
speech and utterance, but in the deeper matters of motion, relation,
and harmony. Hesper's clear-cut but not too sharply defined consonants;
her soft but full-bodied vowels; above all, her slow cadences that
hovered on the verge of song, as her walk on the verge of a slow aerial
dance; the carriage of her head, the movements of her lips, her arms,
her hands; the self-possession that seemed the very embodiment of
law--these formed together a whole of inexpressible delight,
inextricably for Mary associated with music and verse: she would hasten
to serve her as if she had been an angel come to do a little earthly
shopping, and return with the next heavenward tide. Hesper, in response
all but unconscious, would be waited on by no other than Mary; and
always between them passed some sweet, gentle nothings, which afforded
Hesper more pleasure than she could have accounted for.
Her wedding-day was now for the third time fixed, when one morning she
entered the shop to make some purchases. Not happy in the prospect
before her, she was yet inclined to make the best of it so far as
clothes were concerned--the more so, perhaps, that she had seldom yet
been dressed to her satisfaction: she was now brooding over a certain
idea for her wedding-dress, which she had altogether failed in the
attempt to convey to her London _couturiere_; and it had come into her
head to try whether Mary might not grasp her idea, and help her to make
it intelligible. Mary listened and thought, questioned, and desired
explanations--at length, begged she would allow her to ponder the thing
a little: she could hardly at once venture to say anything. Hesper
laughed, and said she was taking a small matter too
seriously--concluding from Mary's hesitation that she had but perplexed
her, and that she could be of no use to her in the difficulty.
"A small matter? Your wedding-dress!" exclaimed Mary, in a tone of
expostulation.
Hesper did not laugh again, but gave a little sigh instead, which
struck sadly on Mary's sympathetic heart. She cast a quick look in her
face. Hesper caught the look, and understood it. For one passing moment
she felt as if, amid the poor pleasure of adorning herself for a hated
marriage, she had found a precious thing of which she had once or twice
dreamed, never thought as a possible existence--a friend, namely, to
love her: the next, she saw the absurdity of imagining a friend in a
shop-girl.
"But I must make up my mind so soon!" she answered. "Madame Crepine
gave me her idea, in answer to mine, but nothing like it, two days ago;
and, as I have not written again, I fear she may be taking her own way
with the thing. I am certain to hate it."
"I will talk to you about it as early as you please to-morrow, if that
will do," returned Mary.
She knew nothing about dressmaking beyond what came of a true taste,
and the experience gained in cutting out and making her own garments,
which she had never yet found a dressmaker to do to her mind; and,
indeed, Hesper had been led to ask her advice mainly from observing how
neat the design of her dresses was, and how faithfully they fitted her.
Dress is a sort of freemasonry between girls.
"But I can not have the horses to-morrow," said Hesper.
"I might," pondered Mary aloud, after a moment's silence, "walk out to
Durnmelling this evening after the shop is shut. By that time I shall
have been able to think; I find it impossible, with you before me."
Hesper acknowledged the compliment with a very pleasant smile. If it be
true, as I may not doubt, that women, in dressing, have the fear of
women and not of men before their eyes, then a compliment from some
women must be more acceptable to some than a compliment from any man
but the specially favored.
"Thank you a thousand times," she drawled, sweetly. "Then I shall
expect you. Ask for my maid. She will take you to my room. Good-by for
the present."
As soon as she was gone, Mary, her mind's eye full of her figure, her
look, her style, her motion, gave herself to the important question of
the dress conceived by Hesper; and during her dinner-hour contrived to
cut out and fit to her own person the pattern of a garment such as she
supposed intended in the not very lucid description she had given her.
When she was free, she set out with it for Durnmelling.
It was rather a long walk, the earlier part of it full of sad reminders
of the pleasure with which, greater than ever accompanied her to
church, she went to pay her Sunday visit at Thornwick; but the latter
part, although the places were so near, almost new to her: she had
never been within the gate of Durnmelling, and felt curious to see the
house of which she had so often heard.
The butler opened the door to her--an elderly man, of conscious dignity
rather than pride, who received the "young person" graciously, and,
leaving her in the entrance-hall, went to find "Miss Mortimer's maid,"
he said, though there was but one lady's-maid in the establishment.
The few moments she had to wait far more than repaid her for the
trouble she had taken: through a side-door she looked into the great
roofless hall, the one grand thing about the house. Its majesty laid
hold upon her, and the shopkeeper's daughter felt the power of the
ancient dignity and ineffaceable beauty far more than any of the family
to which it had for centuries belonged.
She was standing lost in delight, when a rude voice called to her from
half-way up a stair:
"You're to come this way, miss."
With a start, she turned and went. It was a large room to which she was
led. There was no one in it, and she walked to an open window, which
had a wide outlook across the fields. A little to the right, over some
trees, were the chimneys of Thornwick. She almost started to see
them--so near, and yet so far--like the memory of a sweet, sad story.
"Do you like my prospect?" asked the voice of Hesper behind her. "It is
flat."
"I like it much, Miss Mortimer," answered Mary, turning quickly with a
bright face. "Flatness has its own beauty. I sometimes feel as if room
was all I wanted; and of that there is so much there! You see over the
tree-tops, too, and that is good--sometimes--don't you think?"
Miss Mortimer gave no other reply than a gentle stare, which expressed
no curiosity, although she had a vague feeling that Mary's words meant
something. Most girls of her class would hardly have got so far.
The summer was backward, but the day had been fine and warm, and the
evening was dewy and soft, and full of evasive odor. The window looked
westward, and the setting sun threw long shadows toward the house. A
gentle wind was moving in the tree-tops. The spirit of the evening had
laid hold of Mary. The peace of faithfulness filled the air. The day's
business vanished, molten in the rest of the coming night. Even
Hesper's wedding-dress was gone from her thoughts. She was in her own
world, and ready, for very, quietness of spirit, to go to sleep. But
she had not forgotten the delight of Hesper's presence; it was only
that all relation between them was gone except such as was purely human.
"This reminds me so of some beautiful verses of Henry Vaughan!" she
said, half dreamily.
"What do they say?" drawled Hesper.
Mary repeated as follows:
"'The frosts are past, the storms are gone,
And backward life at last comes on.
And here in dust and dirt, O here,
The Lilies of His love appear!'"
"Whose did you say the lines were?" asked Hesper, with merest automatic
response.
"Henry Vaughan's," answered Mary, with a little spiritual shiver as of
one who had dropped a pearl in the miry way.
"I never heard of him," rejoined Hesper, with entire indifference.
For anything she knew, he might be an occasional writer in "The
Belgrave Magazine," or "The Fireside Herald." Ignorance is one of the
many things of which a lady of position is never ashamed; wherein she
is, it may be, more right than most of my readers will be inclined to
allow; for ignorance is not the thing to be ashamed of, but neglect of
knowledge. That a young person in Mary's position should know a certain
thing, was, on the other hand, a reason why a lady in Hesper's position
should not know it! Was it possible a shop-girl should know anything
that Hesper ought to know and did not? It was foolish of Mary, perhaps,
but she had vaguely felt that a beautiful lady like Miss Mortimer, and
with such a name as Hesper, must know all the lovely things she knew,
and many more besides.
"He lived in the time of the Charleses," she said, with a tremble in
her voice, for she was ashamed to show her knowledge against the
other's ignorance.
"Ah!" drawled Hesper, with a confused feeling that people who kept
shops read stupid old books that lay about, because they could not
subscribe to a circulating library.--"Are you fond of poetry?" she
added; for the slight, shadowy shyness, into which her venture had
thrown Mary, drew her heart a little, though she hardly knew it, and
inclined her to say something.
"Yes," answered Mary, who felt like a child questioned by a stranger in
the road; "--when it is good," she added, hesitatingly.
"What do you mean by good?" asked Hesper--out of her knowledge, Mary
thought, but it was not even out of her ignorance, only out of her
indifference. People must say something, lest life should stop.
"That is a question difficult to answer," replied Mary. "I have often
asked it of myself, but never got any plain answer."
"I do not see why you should find any difficulty in it," returned
Hesper, with a shadow of interest. "You know what you mean when you say
to yourself you like this, or you do not like that."
"How clever she is, too!" thought Mary; but she answered: "I don't
think I ever say anything to myself about the poetry I read--not at the
time, I mean. If I like it, it drowns me; and, if I don't like it, it
is as the Dead Sea to me, in which you know you can't sink, if you try
ever so."
Hesper saw nothing in the words, and began to fear that Mary was so
stupid as to imagine herself clever; whereupon the fancy she had taken
to her began to sink like water in sand. The two were still on their
feet, near the window--Mary, in her bonnet, with her back to it, and
Hesper, in evening attire, with her face to the sunset, so that the one
was like a darkling worshiper, the other like the radiant goddess. But
the truth was, that Hesper was a mere earthly woman, and Mary a
heavenly messenger to her. Neither of them knew it, but so it was; for
the angels are essentially humble, and Hesper would have condescended
to any angel out of her own class.
"I think I know good poetry by what it does to me," resumed Mary,
thoughtfully, just as Hesper was about to pass to the business of the
hour.
"Indeed!" rejoined Hesper, not less puzzled than before, if the word
should be used where there was no effort to understand. Poetry had
never done anything to her, and Mary's words conveyed no shadow of an
idea.
The tone of her _indeed_ checked Mary. She hesitated a moment, but went
on.
"Sometimes," she said, "it makes me feel as if my heart were too big
for my body; sometimes as if all the grand things in heaven and earth
were trying to get into me at once; sometimes as if I had discovered
something nobody else knew; sometimes as if--no, not _as if_, for then
I _must_ go and pray to God. But I am trying to tell you what I don't
know how to tell. I am not talking nonsense, I hope, only ashamed of
myself that I can't talk sense.--I will show you what I have been doing
about your dress."
Far more to Hesper's surprise and admiration than any of her
half-foiled attempts at the utterance of her thoughts, Mary, taking
from her pocket the shape she had prepared, put it on herself, and,
slowly revolving before Hesper, revealed what in her eyes was a
masterpiece.
"But how clever of you!" she cried.--Her own fingers had not been quite
innocent of the labor of the needle, for money had long been scarce at
Durnmelling, and in the paper shape she recognized the hand of an
artist.--"Why," she continued, "you are nothing less than an
accomplished dressmaker!"
"That I dare not think myself," returned Mary, "seeing I never had a
lesson."
"I wish you would make my wedding-dress," said Hesper.
"I could not venture, even if I had the time," answered Mary. "The
moment I began to cut into the stuff, I should be terrified, and lose
my self-possession. I never made a dress for anybody but myself."
"You are a little witch!" said Hesper; while Mary, who had roughly
prepared a larger shape, proceeded to fit it to her person.
She was busy pinning and unpinning, shifting and pinning again, when
suddenly Hesper said:
"I suppose you know I am going to marry money?"
"Oh! don't say that. It's too dreadful!" cried Mary, stopping her work,
and looking up in Hesper's face.
"What! you supposed I was going to marry a man like Mr. Redmain for
love?" rejoined Hesper, with a hard laugh.
"I can not bear to think of it!" said Mary. "But you do not really mean
it! You are only--making fun of me! Do say you are."
"Indeed, I am not. I wish I could say I was! It is very horrid, I know,
but where's the good of mincing matters? If I did not call the thing by
its name, the thing would be just the same. You know, people in our
world have to do as they must; they can't pick and choose like you
happy creatures. I dare say, now, you are engaged to a young man you
love with all your heart, one you would rather marry than any other in
the whole universe."
"Oh, dear, no!" returned Mary, with a smile most plainly fancy-free. "I
am not engaged, nor in the least likely to be."
"And not in love either?" said Hesper--with such coolness that Mary
looked up in her face to know if she had really said so.
"No," she replied.
"No more am I," echoed Hesper; "that is the one good thing in the
business: I sha'n't break my heart, as some girls do. At least, so they
say--I don't believe it: how could a girl be so indecent? It is bad
enough to marry a man: that one can't avoid; but to die of a broken
heart is to be a traitor to your sex. As if women couldn't live without
men!"
Mary smiled and was silent. She had read a good deal, and thought she
understood such things better than Miss Mortimer. But she caught
herself smiling, and she felt as if she had sinned. For that a young
woman should speak of love and marriage as Miss Mortimer did, was too
horrible to be understood--and she had smiled! She would have been less
shocked with Hesper, however, had she known that she forced an
indifference she could not feel--her last poor rampart of sand against
the sea of horror rising around her. But from her heart she pitied her,
almost as one of the lost.
"Don't fix your eyes like that," said Hesper, angrily, "or I shall cry.
Look the other way, and listen.--I am marrying money, I tell you--and
for money; therefore, I ought to get the good of it. Mr. Mortimer will
be father enough to see to that! So I shall be able to do what I
please. I have fallen in love with you; and why shouldn't I have you
for my--"
She paused, hesitating: what was it she was about to propose to the
little lady standing before her? She had been going to say _maid_: what
was it that checked her? The feeling was to herself shapeless and
nameless; but, however some of my readers may smile at the notion of a
girl who served behind a counter being a lady, and however ready Hesper
Mortimer would have been to join them, it was yet a vague sense of the
fact that was now embarrassing her, for she was not half lady enough to
deal with it. In very truth, Mary Marston was already immeasurably more
of a lady than Hesper Mortimer was ever likely to be in this world.
What was the stateliness and pride of the one compared to the fact that
the other would have died in the workhouse or the street rather than
let a man she did not love embrace her--yes, if all her ancestors in
hell had required the sacrifice! To be a martyr to a lie is but false
ladyhood. She only is a lady who witnesses to the truth, come of it
what may.
"--For my--my companion, or something of the sort," concluded Hesper;
"and then I should be sure of being always dressed to my mind."
"That _would_ be nice!" responded Mary, thinking only of the kindness
in the speech.
"Would you really like it?" asked Hesper, in her turn pleased.
"I should like it very much," replied Mary, not imagining the proposal
had in it a shadow of seriousness. "I wish it were possible."
"Why not, then? Why shouldn't it be possible? I don't suppose you would
mind using your needle a little?"
"Not in the least," answered Mary, amused. "Only what would they do in
the shop without me?"
"They could get somebody else, couldn't they?"
"Hardly, to take my place. My father was Mr. Turnbull's partner."
"Oh!" said Hesper, not much instructed. "I thought you had only to give
warning."
There the matter dropped, and Mary thought no more about it.
"You will let me keep this pattern?" said Hesper.
"It was made for you," answered Mary.
While Hesper was lazily thinking whether that meant she was to pay for
it, Mary made her a pretty obeisance, and bade her good night. Hesper
returned her adieu kindly, but neither shook hands with her nor rang
the bell to have her shown out Mary found her own way, however, and
presently was breathing the fresh air of the twilight fields on her way
home to her piano and her books.
For some time after she was gone, Hesper was entirely occupied with the
excogitation of certain harmonies of the toilet that must minister
effect to the dress she had now so plainly before her mind's eye; but
by and by the dress began to melt away, and like a dissolving view
disappeared, leaving in its place the form of "that singular
shop-girl." There was nothing striking about her; she made no such
sharp impression on the mind as compelled one to think of her again;
yet always, when one had been long enough in her company to feel the
charm of her individuality, the very quiet of any quiet moment was
enough to bring back the sweetness of Mary's twilight presence. For
this girl, who spent her days behind a counter, was one of the
spiritual forces at work for the conservation and recovery of the
universe.
Not only had Hesper Mortimer never had a friend worthy of the name, but
no idea of pure friendship had as yet been generated in her. Sepia was
the nearest to her intimacy: how far friendship could have place
between two such I need not inquire; but in her fits of misery Hesper
had no other to go to. Those fits, alas! grew less and less frequent;
for Hesper was on the downward incline; but, when the next came, after
this interview, she found herself haunted, at a little distance, as it
were, by a strange sense of dumb, invisible tending. It did not once
come close to her; it did not once offer her the smallest positive
consolation; the thing was only this, that the essence of Mary's being
was so purely ministration, that her form could not recur to any memory
without bringing with it a dreamy sense of help. Most powerful of all
powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful
than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing
itself, and is the parent of action. Had anything that Mary said
recurred to Hesper, she would have thought of it only as the poor
sentimentality of a low education.
But Hesper did not think of Mary's position as low; that would have
been to measure it; and it did not once suggest itself as having any
relation to any life in which she was interested. She saw no difference
of level between Mary and the lawyer who came about her marriage
settlements: they were together beyond her social horizon. In like
manner, moral differences--and that in her own class--were almost
equally beyond recognition. If by neglect of its wings, an eagle should
sink to a dodo, it would then recognize only the laws of dodo life. For
the dodos of humanity, did not one believe in a consuming fire and an
outer darkness, what would be left us but an ever-renewed _alas_! It is
truth and not imperturbability that a man's nature requires of him; it
is help, not the leaving of cards at doors, that will be recognized as
the test; it is love, and no amount of flattery that will prosper;
differences wide as that between a gentleman and a cad will contract to
a hair's breadth in that day; the customs of the trade and the picking
of pockets will go together, with the greater excuse for the greater
need and the less knowledge; liars the most gentleman-like and the most
rowdy will go as liars; the first shall be last, and the last first.
Hesper's day drew on. She had many things to think about--things very
different from any that concerned Mary Marston. She was married; found
life in London somewhat absorbing; and forgot Mary.