HESTER GOULD.
"No one but Miss Hester Gould," the old nurse had answered, in reply
to Robert Streightley's question; and he had never bestowed a thought
upon the answer. What was Hester Gould to him, or he to Hester Gould?
To the first section of this inquiry the present chapter will furnish
a reply; to the second, time only; time, just then busy with the
beginning of many complications in the life of a man whose career had
been singularly even, uneventful, and interesting only so far as it
had developed his abilities and the results of their employment.
The young lady, whose brief parley with Alice had simply consisted of
the words reported to her master and darling by the old nurse, had
known the unpretending little family at Brixton for several years, and
had been, for the chief of that number, intimate with Mrs. Streightley
and her daughter Ellen. This intimacy, however, was one-sided; Hester
Gould was completely in the harmless and unimportant confidence of the
two ladies, but they were not in hers. This was no treacherous,
insidious distinction, no deliberate preference of other friends, on
Hester Gould's part; for she was a woman who gave her confidence to no
one; a woman of a self-sufficing nature, and the safest possible
confidante, because she never felt sufficiently interested in any one
person to betray another for his or her sake. No one could justly
accuse Hester Gould of flattery or fawning, yet she induced her
acquaintances to conceive enthusiastic friendships for her, and to
tell her their most intimate concerns, to discover that she was
indispensable to their comfort, and the dearest creature in the world;
to declare that they did not know what they should do without her, and
that her advice was always the best. How did the girl, without
descending to the despicable meanness of toadyism, achieve popularity
in her narrow sphere, though she was undeniably handsome, and that too
after a fashion that was capable of development into downright beauty
of a high type, if circumstances had been more favourable to her? She
achieved it by "masterly inactivity." Whether she had thought over the
life that lay before her, had formed a philosophy of her own, and
decided upon a line of conduct as the result of her meditations,
before she left the second-rate boarding-school at Peckham, where she
had acquired all the technical education she possessed, it would be
impossible to say, and the supposition that she had done so appears
unnatural and far-fetched. It was probably partly by the instinct of
native shrewdness, and partly by the exercise of precocious powers of
observation, that Hester Gould discovered that the great art of making
herself agreeable consisted in letting her friends talk to her of
themselves, without claiming a reciprocal right. However that may have
been, she observed as a rule strict reticence concerning her own
affairs, and endured with smiling patience, paying her friends that
subtlest of compliments, undivided attention; and displaying interest,
which if not demonstrative was practical, in the fullest details
concerning theirs. She was of a cold, silent, repressed nature, not
exactly unamiable or false; but a woman who might become either under
circumstances more disadvantageous than hers were at present, or might
expand under favourable and fostering influences into a higher type of
womanhood than she either physically or intellectually indicated now.
Hester Gould was a handsome woman at twenty, a period of life which
she had reached only a few days before that on which she had made
affectionate inquiries for Ellen Streightley; but she would probably
be a handsomer woman at thirty, and if she then fulfilled the latent
promise of beauty, would have a fair chance of retaining it long past
the period at which the loveliness of women, in all but very
exceptional cases, ceases to be a fact, and becomes a memory. She was
tall and full-formed; but as yet she wanted gracefulness. She had
handsome features and fine keen dark eyes; but her face had not
sufficient colour, and her eyes had too little depth; they lacked
intensity; not that they were shifty and uncertain, but that they bore
the vague, absent expression which tells of discontent, not particular
but general. Looking attentively at Hester Gould, one given to
studying character in faces would know that there was incongruity
between the actual and the potential position of the girl. Without
restlessness, without impatience, always ruled by common sense, she
seemed to be a person who had something in view, which if not a firm
resolve, was at least a cherished purpose. The tenor of her life was
even and simple enough, and there was nothing remarkable in her
history. Her parents had been plain people: her father, secretary to
an old-established insurance office, had patronised the concern to the
extent of securing a decent sum for the maintenance of his sister and
only child. Her mother, who had "disobliged her family," as the phrase
is, by her marriage, had died when Hester was a baby; and the only
member of the disobliged family now living was a wealthy shipowner,
who had declined to take any notice of the sister who had disgraced
herself by wedding a poor man. Mr. Gould came of parents quite as
well-born as his wife's: they were all of the respectable tradesman
class; but their standard was one of money value, and he did not come
up to it. They might have helped him to approach it, without
inconveniencing themselves; but they did not consider or care about
that, and the breach had been complete; indeed it had soon become
irremediable; for Mrs. Gould had survived her marriage only four
years, and had died, taking her infant son with her away from all
family quarrels and human affairs. Hester grew up, under the kindly,
timid, narrow-minded charge of her aunt; a meek spinster given to the
perusal and distribution of tracts, and to the frequentation of
meeting-houses where the doctrine was strong and the preaching
unctuous. The child became "too much" for her timid aunt and her
depressed father at an early period of her existence, and even
rebelled against the vicarious authority of Miss Gould's favourite
"ministers;" so she was sent to school, and there also she gave no
little trouble for a time. But common sense was always Hester's strong
point; and it came to her assistance. School was far from pleasant,
she reflected, but home was worse; and as she had no power to provide
herself with a third alternative at present, she would abide by the
lesser of two evils, and turn it to all the advantage she could. The
result of this rational conclusion was that Hester Gould profited to
the utmost by the limited quantity and mediocre quality of the
education administered at Laburnum Lodge, and acquired at least a
foundation on which to build afterwards according to her taste.
The discretion evinced by the schoolgirl was a clue to her character.
No one was more popular among the small and far from distinguished
community; but only the girls whose social position was a little
higher than her own could claim Hester as an intimate friend. The
gushing nonsense of school friendships had little attraction for her,
and she contracted none that she did not contemplate maintaining when
the association which had produced them should have ceased. Hester was
not brilliantly clever, there was not the least _soupçon_ of genius
about her; but she was certainly a superior person in intellect, in
manners, and in appearance, to the companions of her studies, the
sharers of her school life, in that most unbearable kind of intimacy
which means contact without companionship. When she went home for the
holidays, things were not much better. She had been fond of her father
in a quiet way, though she had taken his intellectual measure pretty
accurately, and almost as as soon as she had arrived at the conclusion
that their life was on a dull mean scale, had recognised his inability
to elevate or enliven it.
"We should grub on like this all our lives, if it depended on _him_,"
the girl had said to herself in emphatic, if not elegant soliloquy;
and there had been no wilful disrespect to the honest, humdrum,
unobservant father in the remark, only Hester's unclouded perception
and resolute custom of telling herself the truth. When she was a
little over fifteen years old her father died, and she had to endure,
in addition to her natural grief, which was unfeigned and sore, a
declension in position, and a narrowing of the narrow income, which at
its best she had regarded with impatience, very keen though never
expressed, or permitted to escape her by so much as a gesture. Her
aunt moved into a smaller house in an inferior situation, discharged
one of the two female servants who had composed their modest
establishment, and told Hester she hoped she had profited sufficiently
by her music and singing lessons to go on without a master, for she
could no longer afford to continue them.
Hester bore the alteration with apparent equanimity, but she took a
resolution and acted upon it. She was a musician by nature, and music
was the one branch of study to which she had taken with avidity,
and which she had pursued with unrelaxed industry. She went to the
schoolmistress (the establishment had not yet attained to the
distinction of possessing a "lady principal"), and asked her to put
her in the immediately-to-be-vacated place of a pupil-teacher,
allowing her to continue her own music and singing lessons as an
equivalent for her services. The proposition took Miss Nickson by
surprise; but she knew Hester Gould's abilities and popularity, and
though she did not like the girl particularly, she trusted her fully.
It never occurred to the schoolmistress--a simple woman, and a
favourable specimen of a generally disagreeable class--that Hester had
not made the proposition at her aunt's suggestion, while that young
lady contented herself with informing Miss Lavinia Gould by letter of
what she had done. "I don't lose caste by it here, where they all know
me and I have been on equal terms with them," thought Hester; "and my
only chance of getting out of our odious mean existence is by making
all I can of such education as I can get. I shall have to teach
anyhow, and I can fit myself for teaching a better class of people
here." It was not a stupid calculation for so young a head, and it
turned out perfectly correct. Hester did not lose caste when her
schoolfellows became her pupils, and her teachers in their turn took
additional pains with her when they knew the object with which she was
learning.
Among Hester's intimates for several of her school years was Ellen
Streightley, a girl who loved and worshipped one who was in most
respects her opposite with a kind of enthusiasm not rare among
unworldly natures, in which the intellect is much less powerful than
the feelings. The boarding-school at Peckham was not altogether such
an establishment as Miss Streightley should have been kept at beyond
the period of primary instruction; but her mother was a shy, gentle,
unworldly woman, who did not understand any thing about social
ambition, and provided she found her daughter brought up in sound
morals and good manners would not have considered for a moment whether
her associates were of a higher class than her own, or came of richer
or poorer people. Mrs. Streightley had never changed her mode of life
in accordance with her increased means; she had but a narrow circle,
which was, however, quite satisfactory to her, and she regarded the
commercial and financial magnates with whom her son associated on the
rare occasions of his "going into society," as completely out of the
sphere of herself and her daughter. This daughter was very dear to
her; a tranquil, gentle, congenial companion, a child who had never
given her an hour's true anxiety in her life, and had even had the
measles and the whooping-cough much more lightly and favourably than
other children. Ellen Streightley was short, slight, and extremely
fair. She was not exactly pretty, but the calm sweetness of her face
was very winning, and the perfect candour and gentleness which sat
upon her smooth forehead and looked out of her full blue eyes had an
unwearying charm for those who knew how true these indications were of
the mind and heart within. Ellen Streightley loved her mother and her
brother Robert with all the devotion and dutifulness of her nature;
but Hester Gould she loved with enthusiasm in addition. From the first
Hester's strong mind had charmed and swayed her, and the imagination
of the girl, not very vivid and but rarely awakened, had surrounded
her with a halo of its weaving. Had Hester's moral nature been much or
openly defective, she never would have won this tribute of love and
worship from Ellen Streightley, who had good sense to come in aid of
her high principle, and her perfect purity of heart, but who succumbed
to the superiority of Hester with a delighted submission. When they
were children together, Hester's word had been the other's law, and
had any thing been needed to perfect her love and admiration, Hester's
conduct in voluntarily assuming the position of pupil-teacher in order
that her aunt might suffer as little as possible from their narrow
circumstances would have supplied their complement. There was no
falsehood in this statement, made by Hester to her friend. It was
quite true, only it was not the whole of her motive, but a part, and
not the chief part of it.
And Hester--what was her share in this strict and loving alliance?
Decidedly she liked Ellen Streightley very much, and she prized
highly, without comprehending it altogether, the enthusiastic
affection of which she was the object, the unreserved confidence of
which she was the recipient. She liked the Saturdays and Sundays which
she passed at Mrs. Streightley's house at Brixton, when Ellen's
schooldays had come to a conclusion, and her friend coaxed Miss
Lavinia Gould to spare Hester to her; a request that lady did not
hesitate to grant, as she had very little need of her niece's society;
her "Sabbaths," as she punctiliously called them, being passed in hot
untiring chase of popular preachers, according to her notions of
popularity and estimate of preachers. She declined to join the family
party on Sundays, firstly on Sabbatarian principles, secondly because
the Streightleys were "Church of England," and she hated that
persuasion only a little less than the Roman Communion, and the
opposition chapel which set itself against the ministrations of her
own particular pastor and saint, the Rev. Malachy Farrell, a powerful
controversialist, and a convert from the Romish heresy and abomination
of desolation. Ellen had enjoined her mother to exert herself to "make
a connection" for Hester, when her days of pupil-teachership came to a
conclusion; that lady had obediently exerted herself; Miss Nickson had
done as much for the girl, with whom she had never had occasion to
find a fault, but who, she rather remorsefully admitted to herself,
had never "gained on her" in all the years of their association; and
Hester, at twenty years old, when we meet her first, was established
as a teacher of music, with a respectable connection, and occupied
with her aunt a pretty small house near the Brixton Villa, which, in
elegance and habitableness was a considerable improvement on that in
which her father had lived and died.
Ellen Streightley had never cooled or wavered in her love for Hester;
and her mother liked the girl very much, though she sometimes had an
uncomfortable sort of feeling that she did not understand her
perfectly, that Hester might perhaps be "too much" for her and Ellen,
if she should think it worth her while to be so. But the kind lady was
little given to mental exercises of any troublesome description, and
never thought of analysing her sensations. That she was an exceptional
person, singularly unsuspicious, and unlike mothers in general, may
surely be conceded, when it is stated that it never occurred to her to
think that Hester might possibly be a dangerous intimate for Robert,
her beloved and precious son, or could cherish any design or idea
whereof he made part. Mrs. Streightley loved her son better than she
loved Ellen; a preference which the girl accepted as a matter of
course, and believed to be perfectly just and well founded. He was
Robert, their Robert, the most important, the most beloved of men, and
of course it was all right; and the two women did but follow the
example of thousands of their sex, whose perceptions and ideas are
confined within a small circle, and whose social sphere and enjoyments
resemble a mill, and the going round therein performed by patient and
tolerably well-fed beasts. Robert was an amiable man on the whole; he
gave no more trouble in the household than was inseparable from the
circumstance that he was a man and "didn't understand things," as the
household phrase has it, and he loved his mother devotedly, and Ellen
very much indeed. It had never occurred to him that her life was a
dull one, and that he was rich enough to make it a very different
life, if he would but waken up and look away from his counting-house,
learn sympathy, and consider what was the real meaning and worth of
money. He had never thought of the light and colour, the stir and
healthful pleasure he might diffuse through the decorous, comfortable,
neutral-tinted existence of the Brixton Villa; he had never noticed
their absence; and as he had no notion of the life led by other girls,
on whom money was lavishly expended, and for whose delectation whole
household systems were organised, there was no standard of comparison
in his mind. He was so much older than his sister, so much nearer his
mother's age than hers, that while perfect affection had always
subsisted between them, it had not been accompanied with much
intimacy, and his confidences, which were wholly confined to business
matters, had been restricted to his mother, on whose mind it had never
dawned that any improvement in their household affairs could be
desirable, who had never looked or desired to look outside the circle
in which she moved, and who would have received any suggestion of an
increase of Ellen's social opportunities and enjoyments with entire
incredulity. To her Ellen was as yet little more than a child; and
though if he had been asked what was her age, and had paused to think
the matter over, Robert would have perceived the absurdity of so
regarding a girl of nineteen, by no means childish of her years,
though simple and unworldly as few children are in these progressive
days, he practically shared her delusion.
Robert was almost as much accustomed to see Hester Gould as he was to
see Ellen. The girls were together as much as possible, due
consideration being had to Hester's occupations, and the social duties
and privileges of her "connection," which she never neglected. She led
an infinitely pleasanter life than did Ellen; for she was very popular
among her pupils, and many of their number contrived to extend to her
their own amusements and pleasures. She had not much leisure, but she
was under no painful necessity to overwork herself; her occupation
need never degenerate into slavery, and such hours as she could devote
to recreation she could always find recreation to fill. She possessed
perfect health and an even temper; not according to the cynical
saying, "A good digestion and a bad heart,"--not yet, at least. Up to
the present time nothing in Hester's conduct had indicated badness of
heart; a little coldness perhaps, but unperceived, and resolution
whose inflexibility might have been suspected, but that her resolves
had all been in the direction of right and duty. If any body had
asked Robert Streightley whether he was acquainted with Miss Hester
Gould, he would have unhesitatingly replied that he knew her most
intimately--as well as his own sister; and he would have made such an
answer in perfectly good faith. It would not have been true,
nevertheless. If any one had asked Hester Gould whether she knew
Robert Streightley, she would have replied that he was an acquaintance
of hers, being the brother of one of her dearest friends--(Hester
would not have said her "dearest friend," for such a sweeping phrase
might have been repeated to her detriment); and she would have said it
in a tone calculated to convince the questioner that her acquaintance
with Mr. Streightley was of the most formal and conventional kind. In
this instance the reply would only have had the exterior of truth, for
no one in the world--certainly not the man himself--knew Robert
Streightley as well, as thoroughly as Hester Gould knew him. Not his
sister, who would talk cheerily about her brother, and extol his
genius, his temper, and his personal appearance; not his mother, who
would tell Hester a dozen times in a week that he had never caused her
an hour's anxiety, and who never admitted that he had a fault, except
his tiresome-objection to sitting for his photograph; not the old
nurse, who would scold Robert freely enough herself, but in whose
hearing no one would have had the boldness to declare him subject to
the faults, the misfortunes, or the maladies of humanity. It was a
fortunate circumstance that Hester Gould had perfectly read Robert
Streightley's character, and had, without any thing like impertinent
inquisitiveness, acquired a thorough knowledge of the family history
and his personal antecedents; for, some time before the period of her
friend's visit to Yorkshire, Hester Gould had made up her mind that
she would marry Robert Streightley if possible, and Ellen's last
letter had induced her to think of doing so at an earlier period than
she had previously contemplated.
"I don't know that Ellen's marriage will not be the best thing that
could possibly happen for me," said Hester to herself as she walked
briskly away from Robert Streightley's house, after her parley with
old Alice. "Of course her brother won't oppose it,--though the girl is
a greater fool than I thought her, to marry a man with no greater
ambition than to spend his life among filthy savages, teaching them a
religion entirely unsuitable to their condition of life and status in
creation. I hope they won't eat him--at least I hope they won't eat
_her_; but she will be better away--I should never succeed in curing
her of Brixton ways, and she has really no tastes to be developed. It
will be a good opportunity, when she will be divided between love for
her Decimus--what a name to be in love with!--and distress at leaving
her mother, to furnish her with a suggestion concerning a substitute:
it must come entirely from her, of course."
Thus thinking, Hester Gould reached home. She greeted aunt Lavinia
kindly; she was scrupulously dutiful and attentive to her wishes,
except in respect to meetings and ministers;--sat down cheerfully to
her tea, during which meal she quite enlivened the pensive spinster by
her gaiety, and then went to her piano for what she called a "real
good practice." Hour after hour she sat there, filling the room and
the house with music; and at length she sang, at her aunt's request,
the very same song--of a trifling kind, which Hester rather despised,
but sang because it was popular--with which Katherine Guyon was at the
selfsame hour achieving the "final pulverisation" of Robert
Streightley's heart.