He rates me as the merchant does the wares
He will not purchase--"quality not high
'Twill lose its color opened to the sun,
Has no aroma, and, in fine, is naught--
I barter not for such commodities--
There is no ratio betwixt sands and gems."
'Tis wicked judgment! for the soul can grow,
As embryos, that live and move but blindly,
Burst from the dark, emerge, regenerate,
And lead a life of vision and of choice.
Esther did not take the carriage into Malthouse Lane, but left it to
wait for her outside the town; and when she entered the house she put
her finger on her lip to Lyddy and ran lightly up-stairs. She wished to
surprise her father by this visit, and she succeeded. The little
minister was just then almost surrounded by a wall of books, with merely
his head peeping above them, being much embarrassed to find a substitute
for tables and desks on which to arrange the volumes he kept open for
reference. He was absorbed in mastering all those painstaking
interpretations of the Book of Daniel, which are by this time well gone
to the limbo of mistaken criticism; and Esther, as she opened the door
softly, heard him rehearsing aloud a passage in which he declared, with
some parenthetic provisoes, that he conceived not how a perverse
ingenuity could blunt the edge of prophetic explicitness, or how an open
mind could fail to see in the chronology of "the little horn" the
resplendent lamp of an inspired symbol searching out the germinal growth
of an anti-Christian power.
"You will not like me to interrupt you, father?" said Esther, slyly.
"Ah, my beloved child!" he exclaimed, upsetting a pile of books, and
thus unintentionally making a convenient breach in his wall, through
which Esther could get up to him and kiss him. "Thy appearing is as a
joy despaired of. I had thought of thee as the blinded think of the
daylight--which indeed is a thing to rejoice in, like all other good,
though we see it not nigh."
"Are you sure you have been as well and comfortable as you said you were
in your letters?" said Esther, seating herself close in front of her
father and laying her hand on his shoulder.
"I wrote truly, my dear, according to my knowledge at the time. But to
an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water
poured on the deep. It seems now that all has been as usual, except my
studies, which have gone somewhat curiously into prophetic history. But
I fear you will rebuke me for my negligent apparel," said the little
man, feeling in front of Esther's brightness like a bat overtaken by the
morning.
"That is Lyddy's fault, who sits crying over her want of Christian
assurance instead of brushing your clothes and putting out your clean
cravat. She is always saying her righteousness is filthy rags, and
really I don't think that is a very strong expression for it. I'm sure
it is dusty clothes and furniture."
"Nay, my dear, your playfulness glances too severely on our faithful
Lyddy. Doubtless I am myself deficient, in that I do not aid her infirm
memory by admonition. But now tell me aught that you have left untold
about yourself. Your heart has gone out somewhat toward this family--the
old man and the child, whom I had not reckoned of?"
"Yes, father. It is more and more difficult to me to see how I can make
up my mind to disturb these people at all."
"Something should doubtless be devised to lighten the loss and the
change to the aged father and mother. I would have you in any case seek
to temper a vicissitude, which is nevertheless a providential
arrangement not to be wholly set aside."
"Do you think, father--do you feel assured that a case of inheritance
like this of mine is a sort of providential arrangement that makes a
command?"
"I have so held it," said Mr. Lyon, solemnly; "in all my meditations I
have so held it. For you have to consider, my dear, that you have been
led by a peculiar path, and into experience which is not ordinarily the
lot of those who are seated in high places, and what I have hinted to
you already in my letters on this head, I shall wish on a future
opportunity to enter into more at large."
Esther was uneasily silent. On this great question of her lot she saw
doubts and difficulties, in which it seemed as if her father could not
help her. There was no illumination for her in this theory of
providential arrangement. She said suddenly (what she had not thought of
at all suddenly)--
"Have you been again to see Felix Holt, father? You have not mentioned
him in your letters."
"I have been since I last wrote, my dear, and I took his mother with me,
who, I fear, made the time heavy to him with her plaints. But afterward
I carried her away to the house of a brother minister at Loamford, and
returned to Felix, and then we had much discourse."
"Did you tell him of everything that has happened--I mean about
me--about the Transomes?"
"Assuredly I told him, and he listened as one astonished. For he had
much to hear, knowing naught of your birth, and that you had any other
father than Rufus Lyon. 'Tis a narrative I trust I shall not be called
on to give to others; but I was not without satisfaction in unfolding
the truth to this young man, who hath wrought himself into my affection
strangely--I would fain hope for ends that will be a visible good in his
less way-worn life, when mine shall be no longer."
"And you told him how the Transomes had come, and that I was staying at
Transome Court?"
"Yes, I told these things with some particularity, as is my wont
concerning what hath imprinted itself on my mind."
"What did Felix say?"
"Truly, my dear, nothing desirable to recite," said Mr. Lyon, rubbing
his hand over his brow.
"Dear father, he did say something, and you always remember what people
say. Pray tell me; I want to know."
"It was a hasty remark, and rather escaped him than was consciously
framed. He said, 'Then she will marry Transome; that is what Transome
means.'"
"That was all?" said Esther, turning rather pale, and biting her lip
with the determination that the tears should not start.
"Yes, we did not go further into that branch of the subject. I apprehend
there is no warrant for his seeming prognostic, and I should not be
without disquiet if I thought otherwise. For I confess that in your
accession to this great position and property, I contemplate with
hopeful satisfaction your remaining attached to that body of
congregational Dissent, which, as I hold, hath retained most of pure and
primitive discipline. Your education and peculiar history would thus be
seen to have coincided with a long train of events in making this family
property a means of honoring and illustrating a purer form of
Christianity than that which hath unhappily obtained the pre-eminence in
this land. I speak, my child, as you know, always in the hope that you
will fully join our communion; and this dear wish of my heart--nay, this
urgent prayer--would seem to be frustrated by your marriage with a man,
of whom there is at least no visible indication that he would unite
himself to our body."
If Esther had been less agitated, she would hardly have helped smiling
at the picture her father's words suggested of Harold Transome "joining
the church" in Malthouse Yard. But she was too seriously preoccupied
with what Felix had said, which hurt her in a two-edged fashion that was
highly significant. First, she was very angry with him for daring to say
positively whom she would marry; and secondly, she was angry at the
implication that there was from the first a cool deliberate design in
Harold Transome to marry her. Esther said to herself that she was quite
capable of discerning Harold Transome's disposition, and judging of his
conduct. She felt sure he was generous and open. It did not lower him in
her opinion that since circumstances had brought them together he
evidently admired her--was in love with her--in short, desired to marry
her; and she thought that she discerned the delicacy which hindered him
from being more explicit. There is no point on which young women are
more easily piqued than this of their sufficiency to judge the men who
make love to them. And Esther's generous nature delighted to believe in
generosity. All these thoughts were making a tumult in her mind while
her father was suggesting the radiance her lot might cast on the cause
of congregational Dissent. She heard what he said, and remembered it
afterward, but she made no reply at present, and chose rather to start
up in search of a brush--an action which would seem to her father quite
a usual sequence with her. It served the purpose of diverting him from a
lengthy subject.
"Have you yet spoken with Mr. Transome concerning Mrs. Holt, my dear?"
he said, as Esther was moving about the room. "I hinted to him that you
would best decide how assistance should be tendered to her."
"No, father, we have not approached the subject. Mr. Transome may have
forgotten it, and, for several reasons, I would rather not talk of
this--of money matters to him at present. There is money due to me from
the Lukyns and the Pendrells."
"They have paid it," said Mr. Lyon, opening his desk. "I have it here
ready to deliver to you."
"Keep it, father, and pay Mrs. Holt's rent with it, and do anything else
that is wanted for her. We must consider everything temporary now," said
Esther, enveloping her father in a towel, and beginning to brush his
auburn fringe of hair, while he shut his eyes in preparation for this
pleasant passivity. "Everything is uncertain--what may become of
Felix--what may become of us all. Oh, dear!" she went on, changing
suddenly to laughing merriment, "I am beginning to talk like Lyddy, I
think."
"Truly," said Mr. Lyon, smiling, "the uncertainty of things is a text
rather too wide and obvious for fruitful application; and to discourse
of it is, as one may say, to bottle up the air, and make a present of it
to those who are already standing out of doors."
"Do you think," said Esther, in the course of their chat, "that the
Treby people know at all about the reasons of my being at Transome
Court?"
"I have had no sign thereof: and indeed there is no one, as it appears,
who could make the story public. The man Christian is away in London
with Mr. Debarry, Parliament now beginning; and Mr. Jermyn would
doubtless respect the confidence of the Transomes. I have not seen him
lately. I know nothing of his movements. And so far as my own speech is
concerned, and my strict command to Lyddy, I have withheld the means of
information even as to your having returned to Transome Court in the
carriage, not wishing to give any occasion to solicitous questioning
till time hath somewhat inured me. But it hath got abroad that you are
there, and is the subject of conjectures, whereof, I imagine, the chief
is, that you are gone as companion to Mistress Transome; for some of our
friends have already hinted a rebuke to me that I should permit your
taking a position so little likely to further your spiritual welfare."
"Now, father, I think I shall be obliged to run away from you, not to
keep the carriage too long," said Esther, as she finished her reforms on
the minister's toilet. "You look beautiful now, and I must give Lyddy a
little lecture before I go."
"Yes, my dear; I would not detain you, seeing that my duties demand me.
But take with you this Treatise, which I have purposely selected. It
concerns all the main questions between ourselves and the
Establishment--government, discipline, state-support. It is seasonable
that you should give a nearer attention to these polemics, lest you be
drawn aside by the fallacious association of a State Church with
elevated rank."
Esther chose to take the volume submissively, rather than to adopt the
ungraceful sincerity of saying that she was unable at present to give
her mind to the original functions of a bishop or the comparative merit
of Endowments and Voluntaryism. But she did not run her eyes over the
pages during her solitary drive to get a foretaste of the argument, for
she was entirely occupied with Felix Holt's prophecy that she would
marry Harold Transome.