Nay, falter not--'tis an assured good
To seek the noblest--'tis your only good
Now you have seen it; for that higher vision
Poisons all meaner choice forevermore.
That day Esther dined with old Mr. Transome only. Harold sent word that
he was engaged and had already dined, and Mrs. Transome that she was
feeling ill. Esther was much disappointed that any tidings Harold might
have brought relating to Felix were deferred in this way; and, her
anxiety making her fearful, she was haunted by the thought that if there
had been anything cheering to tell, he would have found time to tell it
without delay. Old Mr. Transome went as usual to his sofa in the library
to sleep after dinner, and Esther had to seat herself in the small
drawing-room, in a well-lit solitude that was unusually dispiriting to
her. Pretty as this room was, she did not like it. Mrs. Transome's
full-length portrait, being the only picture there, urged itself too
strongly on her attention: the youthful brilliancy it represented
saddened Esther by its inevitable association with what she daily saw
had come instead of it--a joyless, embittered age. The sense that Mrs.
Transome was unhappy, affected Esther more and more deeply as the
growing familiarity which relaxed the efforts of the hostess revealed
more and more the threadbare tissue of this majestic lady's life. Even
the flowers and the pure sunshine and the sweet waters of Paradise would
have been spoiled for a young heart, if the bowered walks had been
haunted by an Eve gone gray with bitter memories of an Adam who had
complained. "The woman----she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." And
many of us know how, even in our childhood, some blank discontented face
on the background of our home has marred our summer mornings. Why was
it, when the birds were singing, when the fields were a garden, and when
we were clasping another little hand just larger than our own, there was
somebody who found it hard to smile? Esther had got far beyond that
childhood to a time and circumstances when this daily presence of
elderly dissatisfaction amidst such outward things as she had always
thought must greatly help to satisfy, awaked, not merely vague
questioning emotion, but strong determining thought. And now, in these
hours since her return from Loamford, her mind was in that state of
highly-wrought activity, that large discourse, in which we seem to stand
aloof from our own life--weighing impartially our own temptations and
the weak desires that most habitually solicit us. "I think I am getting
that power Felix wished me to have: I shall soon see strong visions,"
she said to herself, with a melancholy smile flitting across her face,
as she put out her wax lights that she might get rid of the oppressive
urgency of walls and upholstery and that portrait smiling with deluded
brightness, unwitting of the future.
Just then Dominic came to say that Mr. Harold sent his compliments, and
begged that she would grant him an interview in his study. He disliked
the small drawing-room: if she would oblige him by going to the study at
once, he would join her very soon. Esther went, in some wonder and
anxiety. What she most feared or hoped in these moments related to Felix
Holt, and it did not occur to her that Harold could have anything
special to say to her that evening on other subjects.
Certainly the study was pleasanter than the small drawing-room. A quiet
light shone on nothing but greenness and dark wood, and Dominic had
placed a delightful chair for her opposite to his master's, which was
still empty. All the little objects of luxury around indicated Harold's
habitual occupancy; and as Esther sat opposite all these things along
with the empty chair which suggested the coming presence, the
expectation of his beseeching homage brought with it an impatience and
repugnance which she had never felt before. While these feelings were
strongly upon her, the door opened and Harold appeared.
He had recovered his self-possession since his interview with his
mother: he had dressed and was perfectly calm. He had been occupied with
resolute thoughts, determining to do what he knew that perfect honor
demanded, let it cost him what it would. It is true he had a tacit hope
behind, that it might not cost him what he prized most highly: it is
true he had a glimpse even of reward; but it was not less true that he
would have acted as he did without that hope or glimpse. It was the most
serious moment in Harold Transome's life; for the first time the iron
had entered into his soul, and he felt the hard pressure of our common
lot, the yoke of that mighty resistless destiny laid upon us by the acts
of other men as well as our own.
When Esther looked at him she relented, and felt ashamed of her
gratuitous impatience. She saw that his mind was in some way burdened.
But then immediately sprang the dread that he had to say something
hopeless about Felix.
They shook hands in silence, Esther looking at him with anxious
surprise. He released her hand, but it did not occur to her to sit down,
and they both continued standing on the hearth.
"Don't let me alarm you," said Harold, seeing that her face gathered
solemnity from his. "I suppose I carry the marks of a past agitation. It
relates entirely to troubles of my own--of my own family. No one beyond
is involved in them."
Esther wondered still more, and felt still more relenting.
"But," said Harold, after a slight pause, and in a voice that was
weighted with new feeling, "it involves a difference in my position with
regard to you; and it is on this point that I wished to speak to you at
once. When a man sees what ought to be done, he had better do it
forthwith. He can't answer for himself to-morrow."
While Esther continued to look at him, with eyes widened by anxious
expectation, Harold turned a little, leaned on the mantelpiece, and
ceased to look at her as he spoke.
"My feelings drag me another way. I need not tell you that your regard
has become very important to me--that if our mutual position had been
different--that, in short, you must have seen--if it had not seemed to
be a matter of worldly interest, I should have told you plainly already
that I loved you, and that my happiness could be complete only if you
would consent to marry me."
Esther felt her heart beginning to beat painfully. Harold's voice and
words moved her so much that her own task seemed more difficult than she
had before imagined. It seemed as if the silence, unbroken by anything
but the clicking of the fire, had been long, before Harold turned round
toward her again and said--
"But to-day I have heard something that affects my own position. I
cannot tell you what it is. There is no need. It is not any culpability
of my own. But I have not just the same unsullied name and fame in the
eyes of the world around us, as I believed that I had when I allowed
myself to entertain that wish about you. You are very young, entering on
a fresh life with bright prospects--you are worthy of everything that is
best. I may be too vain in thinking it was at all necessary; but I take
this precaution against myself. I shut myself out from the chance of
trying, after to-day, to induce you to accept anything which others may
regard as specked and stained by any obloquy, however slight."
Esther was keenly touched. With a paradoxical longing, such as often
happens to us, she wished at that moment that she could have loved this
man with her whole heart. The tears came into her eyes; she did not
speak, but, with an angel's tenderness in her face, she laid her hand on
his sleeve. Harold commanded himself strongly and said--
"What is to be done now is, that we should proceed at once to the
necessary legal measures for putting you in possession of your own, and
arranging mutual claims. After that I shall probably leave England."
Esther was oppressed by an overpowering difficulty. Her sympathy with
Harold at this moment was so strong, that it spread itself like a mist
over all previous thought and resolve. It was impossible now to wound
him afresh. With her hand still resting on his arm, she said, timidly--
"Should you be urged--obliged to go--in any case?"
"Not in every case, perhaps," Harold said, with an evident movement of
the blood toward his face; "at least not for long, not for always."
Esther was conscious of the gleam in his eyes. With terror at herself,
she said, in difficult haste, "I can't speak. I can't say anything
to-night. A great decision has to be made: I must wait--till to-morrow."
She was moving her hand from his arm, when Harold took it reverentially
and raised it to his lips. She turned toward her chair, and as he
released her hand she sank down on the seat with a sense that she needed
that support. She did not want to go away from Harold yet. All the while
there was something she needed to know, and yet she could not bring
herself to ask it. She must resign herself to depend entirely on his
recollection of anything beyond his own immediate trial. She sat
helpless under contending sympathies while Harold stood at some distance
from her, feeling more harassed by weariness and uncertainty, now that
he had fulfilled his resolve, and was no longer under the excitement of
actually fulfilling it.
Esther's last words had forbidden his revival of the subject that was
necessarily supreme with him. But still she sat there, and his mind,
busy as to the probabilities of her feeling, glanced over all she had
done and said in the later days of their intercourse. It was this
retrospect that led him to say at last--
"You will be glad to hear that we shall get a very powerfully signed
memorial to the Home Secretary about young Holt. I think your speaking
for him helped a great deal. You made all the men wish what you wished."
This was what Esther had been yearning to hear and dared not ask, as
well from respect for Harold's absorption in his own sorrow, as from the
shrinking that belongs to our dearest need. The intense relief of
hearing what she longed to hear, affected her whole frame: her color,
her expression, changed as if she had been suddenly freed from some
torturing constraint. But we interpret signs of emotion as we interpret
other signs--often quite erroneously, unless we have the right key to
what they signify. Harold did not gather that this was what Esther had
waited for, or that the change in her indicated more than he had
expected her to feel at this allusion to an unusual act which she had
done under a strong impulse.
Besides the introduction of a new subject after very momentous words
have passed, and are still dwelling on the mind, is necessarily a sort
of concussion, shaking us into a new adjustment of ourselves.
It seemed natural that soon afterward Esther put out her hand and said,
"Good-night."
Harold went to his bedroom on the same level with his study, thinking of
the morning with an uncertainty that dipped on the side of hope. This
sweet woman, for whom he felt a passion newer than any he had expected
to feel, might possibly make some hard things more bearable--if she
loved him. If not--well, he had acted so that he could defy anyone to
say he was not a gentleman.
Esther went up-stairs to her bedroom, thinking that she should not sleep
that night. She set her light on a high stand, and did not touch her
dress. What she desired to see with undisturbed clearness were things
not present: the rest she needed was the rest of a final choice. It was
difficult. On each side there was renunciation.
She drew up her blinds, liking to see the gray sky, where there were
some veiled glimmerings of moonlight, and the lines of the forever
running river, and the bending movement of the black trees. She wanted
the largeness of the world to help her thought. This young creature, who
trod lightly backward and forward, and leaned against the window-frame,
and shook back her brown curls as she looked at something not visible,
had lived hardly more than six months since she saw Felix Holt for the
first time. But life is measured by the rapidity of change, the
succession of influences that modify the being; and Esther had undergone
something little short of an inward revolution. The revolutionary
struggle, however, was not quite at an end.
There was something which she now felt profoundly to be the best thing
that life could give her. But--if it was to be had at all--it was not to
be had without paying a heavy price for it, such as we must pay for all
that is greatly good. A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime
rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the
soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know
that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread,
and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that
love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
Esther's previous life had brought her into close acquaintance with many
negations, and with many positive ills too, not of the acutely painful,
but of the distasteful sort. What if she chose the hardship, and had to
bear it alone, with no strength to lean upon--no other better self to
make a place for trust and joy? Her past experience saved her from
illusions. She knew the dim life of the back street, the contact with
sordid vulgarity, the lack of refinement for the senses, the summons to
a daily task; and the gain that was to make that life of privation
something on which she dreaded to turn her back, as if it were
heaven--the presence and the love of Felix Holt--was only a quivering
hope, not a certainty. It was not in her woman's nature that the hope
should not spring within her and make a strong impulse. She knew that he
loved her: had he not said how a woman might help a man if she were
worthy? and if she proved herself worthy? But still there was the dread
that after all she might find herself on the stony road alone, and faint
and be weary. Even with the fulfillment of her hope, she knew that she
pledged herself to meet high demands.
And on the other side there was a lot where everything seemed easy--but
for the fatal absence of those feelings which, now she had once known
them, it seemed nothing less than a fall and degradation to do without.
With a terrible prescience which a multitude of impressions during her
stay at Transome Court had contributed to form, she saw herself in a
silken bondage that arrested all motive, and was nothing better than a
well-cushioned despair. To be restless amidst ease, to be languid among
all appliances for pleasure, was a possibility that seemed to haunt the
rooms of this house, and wander with her under the oaks and elms of the
park. And Harold Transome's love, no longer a hovering fancy with which
she played, but become a serious fact, seemed to threaten her with a
stifling oppression. The homage of a man may be delightful until he asks
straight for love, by which a woman renders homage. Since she and Felix
had kissed each other in the prison, she felt as if she had vowed
herself away, as if memory lay on her lips like a seal of possession.
Yet what had happened that very evening had strengthened her liking for
Harold, and her care for all that regarded him: it had increased her
repugnance to turning him out of anything he had expected to be his, or
to snatching anything from him on the ground of an arbitrary claim. It
had even made her dread, as a coming pain, the task of saying anything
to him that was not a promise of the utmost comfort under this
newly-disclosed trouble of his.
It was already near midnight, but with these thoughts succeeding and
returning in her mind like scenes through which she was living, Esther
had a more intense wakefulness than any she had known by day. All had
been stillness hitherto, except the fitful wind outside. But her ears
now caught a sound within--slight, but sudden. She moved near her door,
and heard the sweep of something on the matting outside. It came closer,
and paused. Then it began again, and seemed to sweep away from her. Then
it approached, and paused as it had done before. Esther listened,
wondering. The same thing happened again and again, till she could bear
it no longer. She opened the door, and in the dim light of the corridor,
where the glass above seemed to make a glimmering sky, she saw Mrs.
Transome's tall figure pacing slowly, with her cheek upon her hand.