HEATHER.
Let me place the picture of Berrie Down before you once again, before
proceeding with my story.
In the stillness of the summer evening, look upon Arthur Dudley’s home,
as the few passers-by pause occasionally to gaze, so that you may stamp
the stage and its accessories on your memory ere the characters I would
group together come prominently forward, and commence acting the
unexciting story it is proposed to tell.
There is the house, with its many windows festooned by westeria and
clematis, roses and magnolia; the house, with its red-tiled roof, with
its grotesque chimneys, with its cheerful drawing-room, with its sunny
bedchambers. There is the lawn, smooth shaven and green, on which the
sunlight falls in broad, golden patches, sloping down sharply to the
Hollow, where the blackberry bushes, and the broom, and the low
underwood, form a mass of tangled wildness. Beyond there is the stream,
and a little to the left Mr. Scrotter’s modest flour-mill; then come
fields, where cows are lying and sheep browsing, and away in the
distance stands Mr. Raidsford’s mansion, with trees about it—trees that
are merged in, and seem to form a part of, the woods and plantations
surrounding Kemms’ Park.
The lawn at Berrie Down is studded with fine old timber. Through the air
pigeons are wheeling, on the ridge-tiles they are cooing; two or three
dogs are lying basking in the sun; at one of the open windows of the
drawing-room a cat is seated, gravely surveying the landscape, and
perhaps at the same time prospectively viewing supper, or
retrospectively thinking of her latest depredations in the dairy. There
is a great peace in the scene—a peace which it requires a person to have
been out in the hurry and turmoil of the world fully to comprehend.
There is a repose in the landscape: in the way the sunbeams fall and
rest upon the grass; in the monotonous cooing of the pigeons; in the
attitudes of the cattle; in the murmur of the stream; in the stillness
of the mill; in the faint rustling of the leaves; in the very perfume of
the flowers; in the soft fanning of the breeze; in the grouping of the
human figures in the landscape.
It would be a scene that for you, friend, and you, worn and weary with
the noise and rush and excitement of this great Babylon—where we are all
speeding so fast through life—to look upon with longing gaze, to
remember afterwards with aching hearts; but people in the country view
these things otherwise, and, accordingly, it was with far different
feelings to any you would experience at sight of such a sunset, that
Squire Dudley occasionally lifted his eyes to look towards the glowing
west, ere dropping them again on the _Times_, the news in which Miss
Ormson, seated on the ground at his feet, was kind enough to share with
him.
Over the grass were scattered five other Dudleys, ranging in age from
fifteen years upwards; one of whom, Alick, came up to his brother, and
interrupted his study of the price of shares with—
“I wonder what time mother will get home; have you really no idea by
which train she is coming?”
“Not the slightest,” said Arthur, laying down his paper, somewhat to the
discomfiture of the young lady, who had been interesting herself with an
“Extraordinary Elopement” paragraph; “and how often, Alick, am I to tell
you not to call Heather ‘mother.’ It is not enough that I have to
support you all, but you must persist in calling my wife, who is almost
as young as Agnes, ‘mother.’ Mother, indeed! I detest such
childishness!”
“If I had a mother like Heather, I should call her mother, and nothing
else,” interposed Bessie, from her lowly position on the grass. “Don’t
be silly, Arthur; let your brothers and sisters speak of your wife as
they have found her.”
“But it irritates me,” persisted the Squire; “while they were young, it
did not so much matter; now, however, when they are all growing up into
men and women, the name sounds absurd. Heather does not look a day older
than Agnes.”
“That is the beauty of the thing,” returned his opponent. “If Heather
looked fifty, or even as old as you do, the charm would be dispelled.”
“Thank you for the implied compliment,” he returned, reddening. It was a
sore point with him that his youth was gone, that his life had borne no
fruit; and, even had the world prospered with him, it is not a pleasant
thing for a man to be told he looks old by a pretty girl!
“Well, you know, Arthur,” said the same girl, frank as she was pretty,
“you never will look so young as your wife. In the first place, she is
ten years younger than you; and in the second, you ought to take a leaf
out of her book, and learn contentment. You ought to cease grumbling and
making yourself and other people wretched. You ought to think yourself
lucky you have got Berrie Down Hollow, instead of always wishing you
were Lord Chancellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury, or King of England,
or something of that kind.”
“What has all this got to do with my brothers and sisters calling my
wife their mother?” he asked. “They have got a mother of their own, and
one mother ought to be quite enough for any person.”
“Mine is one too many for me,” remarked Bessie, with a shrug and a pout;
evading at the same time the newspaper wherewith Arthur made believe to
deal her a rebuking blow. “It is the truth, and I tell her so a dozen
times a week. As for Mrs. Marsden, if you wanted Alick and the rest of
them to feel that devotion towards her which you seem to think I ought
to feel for my respected mother, why did you not let them go with her
when she left Berrie Down? That was your grand mistake, Arthur; if you
had given them so much a year and your blessing——”
“Bessie, I allow no one to interfere in my family concerns,” interrupted
Arthur with dignity.
“Yes, you do,” persisted the young lady, “you allow mamma to do so; and
as I know I shall not have a chance of speaking out my mind when once
she comes, I have been trying latterly to make the best of my
opportunities. Let me tell you all the benefits you would have derived
from such an arrangement.”
“I wish to goodness, Bessie, you would keep your opinions to yourself;
you are enough to drive a man mad.”
“And you are enough to drive a woman mad,” she returned, still looking
up at him with a provoking smile on her face. “Ah, well, you have got
your troubles, and I suppose I shall have mine, if I live long enough.
Now, Alick, what are you waiting to say?”
“That if Arthur wants me to give up calling Heather mother, I will do
so,” spoke the lad. “I know he has fed and clothed us, and——”
“Hang the boy,” interrupted Squire Dudley, pettishly, “call her what you
like, only let me hear no more about it;” and Arthur and his companion
resumed their study of the _Times_, while Alick, with his head bent a
little, walked slowly down the lawn in the direction of the Hollow.
Suddenly there rang a glad cry after him of, “Alick, Alick, she’s come,”
in answer to which the lad only waved his hand and ran on to the tangle
of broom and bramble bushes, from out of which he brought a little girl,
whom he bore in triumph on his shoulder up the hill.
It was a pretty scene, looking at it from the Hollow, on which the
evening sunbeams fell.
The house formed the background of the picture, and for foreground there
was the grassy slope, where were gathered around Mrs. Dudley and Mrs.
Ormson all those who had been awaiting their coming.
A bustle and stir succeeded the previous stillness; there was a rustle
of women’s dresses, a hum of women’s voices. There was much kissing and
rejoicing, much fondling over and welcoming of Heather, who, at length,
disengaging herself from the detaining group of loving hands, went
towards her husband, standing a little outside the circle, and said—
“They won’t let me speak a word to you, Arthur. How have you been all
this time? Have you missed me very much?” And as the others had greeted
her, so she now addressed him with a little tremor in her voice, with
tears of gladness at being home again standing in her eyes.
From a short distance, Bessie Ormson, who had duly presented her cheek
to Heather’s travelling companion, and received in return a maternal
kiss, contemplated this performance, and as she did so, stamped her foot
impatiently on the ground.
“Have you forgotten me, Heather?” she asked, coming forward and putting
her hand almost shyly in Mrs. Dudley’s. “There comes Lally,” she added,
pointing down the hill towards Alick, who advanced at a run, while the
child from her triumphant position clapped her little palms exultingly,
calling out—
“Faster! faster! mamma, mamma!”
Panting for breath, Alick Dudley put Lally into her mother’s arms. “Me
first, me first,” she cried, clinging to Heather, and debarring with
true feminine ingratitude the gallant knight, who had brought her safely
up the hill, from all benefits derivable from the meeting.
“You dreadful child—you bold, exacting little child,” exclaimed Bessie,
taking her away by force. “Do you think no one has any right to your
mamma but yourself? don’t you see I leave my mamma; why can’t you be as
good as I am? Oh! you naughty little puss. _I_ would not have red hair,
Lally; _I_ would not have shilling curls all over my head. I would sell
them if I had them, and wear a wig.”
Whereupon Lally in great glee declared her hair was not red, but
“dolden;” and that Bessie had ugly hair.
“I have what, chatterbox?” demanded Bessie. “Say that again—only say it,
and I will carry you down the hill and bury you among the blackberries.
I will shake you to pieces; I will kill you with kisses. Now, is not my
hair beautiful?”
“No, it is ugly,” persisted Lally; and then there ensued a fierce
contradiction between the two, which ended in Bessie first making
believe to smother the child, and then kissing her, as it may be
questioned whether Bessie Ormson had ever kissed any other creature in
her life.
“I love ’oo,” said Miss Lally, as a sequence to this performance,
putting two of her fingers in her mouth, and surveying society generally
with the profoundest composure.
“And don’t you love me, pet?” inquired Mrs. Ormson, venturing upon the
hazardous experiment of testing the strength of a child’s affections in
the presence of strangers,—“don’t you love me?”
“No, Lally don’t,” was the reply.
“Not if I have brought you something very nice from London?” persisted
Mrs. Ormson.
Lally stretched out her little hand for the bonbons, but declined to
compromise herself by expressing any attachment for the donor.
“Now, do you not love me?” asked Mrs. Ormson, persuasively.
Lally thought the matter over, and decided in the negative.
“If you do not love my mamma, you must give her the bonbons back,
Lally,” suggested Bessie; and she made a feint of taking the sweets
away, which drew forth such a wail from the child as attracted public
attention to the trio.
“Hush, hush, hush!” exclaimed Bessie. “I would not have believed you
could have been so naughty. There, kiss mamma, and make friends with
her. You are to give me half those bonbons, you know!”
To which arrangement Lally demurred; but, eventually, being greatly
under the dominion of Miss Ormson’s superior will, with much trouble of
mind she consented to this division; and under the cedar-tree she and
Bessie parted the spoil.
Such high matters are not, however, to be lightly settled; and they were
still engaged in deciding who was to have the odd sweetmeat, when,
looking up from her lap where the treasures were laid in two heaps,
Bessie saw Mrs. Dudley standing beside her.
“Come in, dear,” said Heather, “the dew is beginning to fall, you will
catch cold;” and as she spoke she laid her hand gently on Bessie’s
shoulder.
Bessie turned and pressed her lips to the white soft fingers; then she
tossed the two heaps into one, and saying to Lally, “You shall have them
all,” rose and faced Mrs. Dudley.
“I saw Gilbert yesterday,” observed the latter.
“Yes?”
The monosyllable Mrs. Dudley understood to be interrogative.
“And I asked him to come down here.”
“Thank you very much; he will be glad to do so.”
“I like him greatly.”
“He is greatly to be liked?” and Bessie, as she said this, slipped her
hand, which was cold as ice, into Mrs. Dudley’s.
“And devoted to you,” went on Heather.
“I wish I were more worthy his devotion,” answered Bessie.
“I wish I could understand you,” was Mrs. Dudley’s answer, after a
pause.
“I do not think there is much to understand,” said Bessie; but her heart
gave a great leap as she spoke, for she knew she was telling a truthful
woman a falsehood.
“I only meant that you strike me as being a little odd at times,”
remarked Heather, gently.
“Not more odd than you strike me as being,” was the reply. Then,
noticing that her companion seemed surprised, she went on, “Cannot you
comprehend? won’t you comprehend that to a girl brought up as I have
been, a woman such as you are is an enigma, a wonder, a never-ending,
always beginning puzzle?”
“What do you mean?” Heather paused in their walk back towards the house
as she asked this question; and I should like you to take your first
look at her as she stands thus intent and unconscious.
Hair of the mellowest, darkest auburn, out of which the original red
still gleamed in the sunlight; eyes brown, and deep and tender; the
fairest, softest, womanliest complexion; teeth white and regular; a full
and somewhat large mouth, parted as she waited for Bessie’s reply.
Altogether a firm face, and yet gentle—the face of a woman who had not
known much sorrow, and yet whom you instinctively felt could endure
patiently almost any amount of trouble which she might be called upon to
bear; the face of a woman who had from her earliest years thought of
others first, of herself last; the face of a woman whom, once married, a
man would know it was hopeless for him to love with a sinful passion,
but who would be a man’s good friend, his very right hand, in time of
need; a face in which there was “help;” a face, which no person who had
once seen it ever quite forgot, which you could not fancy changing and
altering like the countenances of much more beautiful women.
It was the inner loveliness of her nature, its purity, its
steadfastness, its pitiful tenderness which made her seem so exceeding
fair. It was the gentleness and the charity, the patience and the
unselfishness abiding in her, which shone in her eyes and drew people
towards her.
It was a calm, good, happy face at the first glance, and yet, when any
one with a right understanding of human faces came to look into it
closely, there was a sadness underlying the happiness—an expression of
which I should find it difficult to convey an idea, were it not that the
same half-sad, half-worn look is to be observed on the countenances of
those whose constitutions are being undermined by undeveloped disease,
_i.e._, by disease which unconsciously to themselves exists in their
bodies, and is insidiously sapping their health.
A man says he is well, and he feels well; and yet a doctor, looking in
his face, can tell that some part of the mortal machinery is out of
gear, and that ere long there will come a crash which shall reveal the
secret of where the mischief has been brewing; and in like manner, if
anything be wrong about a human being’s life, if utterly unknown to him
or herself, there is a want in it—a vacuum; a stream of affection
running to waste; twining tendrils involuntarily searching about for
something to cling to; if there be a mental hunger, which has not even
sufficient self-knowledge to cry aloud for food; if there be a thirsting
for love, which the poor draught presented fails to satisfy; if there
exist aspirations higher and holier, loftier and grander, than can be
fulfilled by the “daily round, the common task;” if there be an
undefined feeling that the best part of the nature, bestowed by the
Almighty, has never been comprehended, never called out—then, when the
face of that man or that woman is in repose, there will lie brooding
upon it a look of sadness, which sets the mind of an observer at work,
marvelling where the inner life is out of joint—what the mental disease
may be—which, unsuspected even by the patient, is eating the heart out
of the fruit, the wheat out of the ripe ear of grain.
And it was perhaps this second look in Heather Dudley’s face—the
unconscious pathos of her expression when her features were in repose,
which rendered her countenance so interesting.
After all, it is not when the sunlight is streaming over the landscape
that the scene appeals most to our hearts; it is the shadow lying across
the hillside, the cloud darkling on the water, the shades of evening
creeping stealthily down upon the bay, which gives that mournful,
melancholy pathetic look to the face of Nature, that touches us like a
minor chord in music, like the sound of a plaintive melody, and awakens
in our souls a powerful though often almost unconscious response.
In the twilight, when all harsh outlines are smoothed down, our dreams
and our realities can walk forth hand in hand together, and there is but
small discrepancy to be observed between them; and in like manner, when
the shadow of sorrow rests upon the face of a friend, our hearts travel
out to meet his. Before the wind comes and the rain descends, we can
behold the approaching presence of the storm walking upon the waters,
and involuntarily we stretch forth our hands towards the bark which is
sailing on, dreaming of no peril, unthinking of danger.
The sunshine in Heather Dudley’s face was always pleasant to look upon;
and yet Bessie felt it was the inevitable shadow which attracted her,
which made her cherish a love for this woman she had never felt for any
other woman on earth.
Well enough Miss Ormson knew Heather’s life was, according to the
teaching of this world’s lore, a wasted one. Well enough; for the girl,
though young, had lived in society, and had seen sufficient to teach her
that, in all respects—socially, domestically, conjugally,
pecuniarily—Heather might have done better; might have married a man who
could have set her up as an idol in his heart, and thanked God for every
misfortune, for every apparent mischance which had led him, by strange
and devious paths, to the point where he met, and wooed, and wed Heather
Bell.
And Heather herself had never discovered this fact. Though there would
come that terribly plaintive look over her sweet face, that anxious,
sorrowful, forecasting expression into her eyes, still she was a happy
woman.
All this swept vaguely through Bessie Ormson’s mind, even while she
replied, nervously—
“I cannot answer your question if you stand looking at me. Let us walk
on, and I will try to tell you. Between us there is a gulf placed, and I
stretch out my hands vainly trying to cross it. You are all candour and
truth; I am all reserve and deceit——”
“Do not say that,” interrupted Mrs. Dudley.
“But I will say it,” she persisted, passionately. “You shall not think
better of me than I deserve. You shall not imagine I am a girl like your
girls—that I am a woman such as you are. Sometimes, sitting on the grass
quietly by myself, I think about myself. Of course it is folly; but I do
it, and wonder what I should have been like had my lot been cast at
Berrie Down. I have seen nothing in my life but planning and scheming
and shamming—nothing till I came here. Amongst you all, I dream of a
different life to any I have ever known. I feel like a fallen angel on a
short visit to Paradise. How you look at me! How stupid it is to talk
about oneself! Shall we go in?”
“One moment,” Heather said. She had a clear, sweet voice, in which there
was a great virtue of leisure. It was the voice of a woman whose life
had not been hurried by anxiety, by passion, by excitement, or by
over-work. It was one the melody of which never seemed out of time,
never taken too fast. “One moment. Are you really unhappy, Bessie? Is
there anything I could do, to——”
“To help me, you mean,” broke in the other, rapidly. “No one can do
that. Am I unhappy? What cause have I for unhappiness? Am I not
engaged—almost settled?”
“But do you love Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Dudley.
“Love him! Yes, I do, as well as married people usually love—perhaps
better,” answered Bessie, and she laughed and dropped the bonbons; and
then Lally and she picked them up out of the grass, and while she kept
her face bent down, Bessie was thinking she could tell Mrs. Dudley one
or two things which it might not have been pleasant for that lady to
hear.
“Lally and I are great friends,” she said, irrelevantly. “I have put her
to bed every night since you went away, and sang her to sleep
afterwards. She is the only person who ever encored my music. Don’t you
love ‘Ritornella,’ Lally? Don’t you delight in ‘Her dark hair hung
loothe?’”
“Iss,” said Lally, readily.
“Agnes adopted Leonard in your absence, and has been really quite
affecting in her maternal solicitude about that young gentleman; but
Lally and I agreed nobody could comb out her hair so well as I—nobody
tell her one-half so many fairy tales. I fear we have not kept such good
hours as we ought; but she looks none the worse for it, does she?”
And Bessie, taking up the child, turned the little freckled face towards
the light, and putting her hand under Lally’s chin, waited for the
mother’s opinion on the appearance of her first-born.
Heather, however, never spoke; there was something the matter with her
she could not have put into words; there shot a pang through her heart
such as had never disturbed it before, and involuntarily almost she
stretched out her arms towards her little girl, who struggled into her
mother’s embrace in spite of Bessie’s teasing efforts to detain her.
“Well, Miss Lally, you’ll see whether I will shake down cherries for you
to-morrow! If any one had told me, I would not have believed you could
have deserted poor Bessie. You promised to be true to me for life. You
are a deceitful little monkey, and I won’t love you a bit.”
In answer to which Lally rejoicingly first slapped Bessie’s cheeks, and
then pulled her hair, and finally offered her mouth, so full of
sweetmeats that she experienced a difficulty in closing it, to the end
that they might kiss and be friends.
“No, I won’t kiss you, indeed,” said Bessie. “I won’t kiss an uncertain
little puss who is everybody’s Joe.” Whereupon Lally declared in a voice
choked with sentiment and sugar-plums, “Se isn’t bodies Joes.”
All this time Heather kept silence, holding the child tight as she could
to her heart.
The sun had set, and as their faces were turned from the west, it seemed
to her that they were walking out of the light into darkness.
She never said to the child, “Don’t you love me, are you not mamma’s
pet?” for she could not, at the moment, have borne to draw a comparison
between Lally’s attachment for Bessie and Lally’s attachment for
herself.
If Heather had a sin, it was inordinate affection for that child; if it
can ever be criminal for a mother to love her first-born too much, then
Heather was a grievous wrong-doer. She loved her son, but she loved
Lally more; loved the absurd little girl who, though christened Lily,
had grown up as unlike one as can possibly be imagined; so unlike that,
not to offend the unities, it had been unanimously decided, in family
conclave, that Lily should be changed to Lally.
“Lily, indeed!” sneered Mrs. Ormson; “an orange lily, perhaps.” But the
red hair, that would curl in “shilling curls,” as Bessie said, was
dearer to Heather than her boy’s darker locks, and she loved every inch
of the child’s body—the fair freckled face, the sunburnt arms, the plump
little neck, the restless feet—with a love which was terrible, as all
great affection is, in its intensity.
“It was sinful,” Mrs. Ormson declared, “the way in which Heather spoiled
that child!” But if this were so, there were other sinners in the house
besides Mrs. Dudley, for Lally was the pet and plaything of every man,
woman, and child about the place; unless, indeed, it might be her
father, who, reversing all ordinary rules, concentrated what affection
he had to spare for any one on his son, whom he made, as Bessie
unhesitatingly informed him, “a disagreeable little pest.”
Perhaps, however, it was not the father who made the child disagreeable
so much as nature. Very little of Heather’s generous unselfishness
seemed to have descended to her second-born. It appeared as though to
Lally had fallen most of her mother’s good qualities, while Leonard
inherited Mr. Dudley’s good looks; for Leonard was what is called a
“beautiful boy,” and all her best friends could say in favour of Lally
was that, very probably, she would grow up into a handsome woman yet.
There was no pride about Miss Lally; she was as ready to accept
affection from the odd man that cleaned the knives and boots, as from
stately Mrs. Piggott, who, having made overtures to Heather, soon after
that young lady’s marriage, had returned to her old dominions and
reigned supreme at Berrie Down, over kitchen, and dairy, and larder. To
Lally, nothing in the way of attention or amusement came amiss; from the
feeding of the chickens to the milking of the cows, from bull’s-eyes to
bonbons, from a tour round the premises, seated in a barrow wheeled by
Ned, the odd man previously mentioned, to a gallop undertaken on the
shoulders of that willing steed Alick, Lally was equally agreeable to,
and gratified with all. She was so utterly cosmopolitan in her ideas,
that Squire Dudley’s pride was daily offended by her utter want of
conservatism. She was so easily pleased, and she found so many people
willing to please her, that he came seriously to the conclusion there
must be something wrong in the child’s mental constitution—some want in
her brains, as he expressed it. “I saw her absolutely one day last
winter,” he told Mrs. Ormson, “with about two pounds of salt in her lap,
being wheeled round the walks by Ned, in search of birds; ‘because you
know, papa,’ she said, ‘if I can once put salt on their tails, we shall
be able to catch them.’”
Whereupon Mrs. Ormson lifted her hands and eyes to heaven, and declared,
“Heather will never stop till she has made that child a perfect idiot.”
“I sent Ned to his work and Lally into the house,” proceeded Arthur,
“but it is of no use _my_ speaking. Five minutes afterwards she was on
Alick’s shoulder, and he was carrying the salt for her in a bag tied
round his neck.”
“Poor Heather, she will find out her mistake some day,” sighed Mrs.
Ormson.
“But it is not Heather alone,” went on Mr. Dudley. “Everybody is the
same; everybody makes a perfect idol of Lally, while Leonard mopes about
alone. Where could you find a better child than he is? He will walk with
me from here to the mill and never say a word, while Lally’s tongue
never ceases from morning till night. Sometimes I think she is in fifty
places at once, for wherever I go I hear her.”
“It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Ormson, “the child will be perfectly
ruined.”
And there can be no doubt but that the lady believed she was speaking
the literal truth. She did, indeed, consider Lally an utter mistake—her
very existence an oversight on the part of Providence.
“A nice, quiet, pretty little girl, who would sit still in the nursery,
with her doll and her picturebook,” was Mrs. Ormson’s idea of the
correct style of thing in the scheme of creation; but a child with red
hair, with a face covered with freckles, exactly like a turkey’s egg,
with reddish-brown eyes, with legs that, in the course of the longest
summer-day, never grew weary of carrying her from parlour to kitchen,
from garden to Hollow, from Hollow to meadow; a child who had no “pretty
ways,” according to Mrs. Ormson’s reading of juvenile attractiveness;
who would not learn anything, nor keep her frocks clean; clearly the
Almighty had not consulted Mrs. Ormson before He sent Lally Dudley into
the world, or such a mistake never would have been committed, not even
to please Heather, to whom the little girl was sun, moon, stars, and
planets.
And because her heart was bound up in the child, Heather could not bear
that another should come in her place, and attract Lally towards her as
Bessie had done. With the “other children,” as Mrs. Dudley still
continued to call her husband’s brothers and sisters, it did not matter;
with the servants also it was of no consequence, for they were all of
the one household, all after a fashion members of one family; but here
was a stranger—daughter to a woman whom Heather did not much like—a girl
whom in her inmost heart Heather distrusted—making friendly overtures to
Lally, which Lally accepted with even more than her ordinary readiness,
with an increase of her wonted gracious affability.
Was what Bessie said true—was Lally everybody’s Joe? Did she not care
for her mother so very, very much, after all? For the first time in her
married life there came swelling up in Heather’s heart a spirit of
antagonism—a desire to quarrel; but, before she reached the house, she
conquered herself and said—
“Your mamma declares I spoil Lally. I wonder what she will think about
you.”
“She can think what she likes, as she usually does,” answered Bessie,
making a movement as if to take Lally from her mother. She had been in
the habit of carrying the child off to bed every night, and it came
natural to her now to do so, though Heather was at home once more.
She forgot she had been but at best a self-constituted viceroy, and that
the rightful queen had returned to take possession of her own again; but
the involuntary backward step with which Heather repulsed her intention
was like a revelation to Bessie. The woman she had regarded as perfect,
was but flesh and blood, after all. She could feel jealous, and she did,
and she meant to keep Lally all to herself for the future, and never to
permit a stranger’s hand to be laid, if she could help it, on the child.
But Bessie was not one to bear such a proceeding patiently. “Don’t
depose me,” she said, in a tone which was one-half of entreaty, half of
banter. “It won’t be for long. Am not I going to a home of my own, where
I shall have something else to do than sing lullabies to other people’s
children? Besides, it will do you good; you are a little inclined to be
jealous. Never fear, I won’t take Lally’s love from you; I could not do
it if I would, and I would not if I could. Let me sing her to sleep
still, please do. She won’t need much rocking to-night;” and she held
out her arms to Lally, who tumbled headlong into them, only sufficiently
awake to clutch at her mother’s sleeve and entreat her to “come too.”
“I will come up when you are in bed, pet,” said Mrs. Dudley, turning
aside into the dining-room, while the girl slowly ascended the broad
staircase, humming “Isabelle” while she carried her light burden step by
step up to that pleasant chamber with the snowy draperies, with the wide
prospect, with its windows half-covered with roses and greenery, which
came back to Bessie Ormson’s memory in dreams when she was far away both
from Hertfordshire and Heather.
After a little time Mrs. Dudley followed her, and kissed the children,
and then stood looking at them lingeringly till she said she must go
down to supper.
“Lally will be fast asleep in two minutes,” remarked Bessie, “then I
will follow you.” But the minutes passed, and still no Bessie put in her
appearance at the “old-fashioned meal,” as Mrs. Ormson styled supper.
“Shall I tell Bessie?” asked Agnes Dudley; and she was about leaving the
room when Heather stopped her.
“I will go, love,” she said, just touching the girl’s cheek with her
hand in passing.
She had tender, caressing ways, this woman, whose life was still all
before her. No one felt neglected when she entered. Her nature was to
consider the very dumb animals,—to leave nothing outside the circle
within which she stood; and feeling that she might have been a little
inconsiderate towards Bessie, she went to seek her, meaning to make
amends, to thank her for all her kindness to Lally.
Very softly she opened the door—softly as a mother does who fears to
wake her children; for a moment she looked in and hesitated; then, even
more softly than she had come, she closed the door and stole along the
corridor perplexed and sorrowful.
In the twilight she had seen Bessie kneeling on the floor beside Lally’s
bed. She held one of the little girl’s hands tight in hers, and her face
was buried in the counterpane. There was no need for singing then. Lally
was fast asleep: the busy feet were still, the tireless tongue silent,
the curly head quiet enough on the pillow, and Bessie, whom nobody ever
beheld depressed in spirits, who was always either laughing or jesting,
scolding or teasing, talking or devising some mischief, was sobbing in
the gathering darkness as though her very heart were breaking.
If Heather had ever thought any hard thoughts about her visitor, they
were swept out of her mind then; if she had ever felt doubts of the
girl, those doubts gave place to sympathy and pity; if she had ever felt
there was something in Bessie Ormson which she did not comprehend, which
she would rather not comprehend, that sensation of repulsion was changed
into an earnest desire to understand her thoroughly, into a conviction
that in places the stream was dark only because it ran deep.
Vaguely and instinctively all this came into Heather Dudley’s heart. As
she retraced her steps along the corridor, she could not have told any
one the reason of the great change which had come over her; but a great
change, nevertheless, had been effected during the moment she stood
looking at the kneeling figure, prostrated in a very abandonment of
grief.
From that hour, through good report and through evil, when appearances
were in her favour, and when appearances were all against her,
unconsciously almost to herself, Heather Dudley loved Bessie Ormson.
In her grief, in her agony of sorrow, in her clinging attachment to
Lally, in her passion of despair, of hopelessness, of loneliness, of
regret, of indecision, Heather’s heart clave to that of her guest, and
her soul was from thenceforth knit to Bessie, as was the soul of
Jonathan with the soul of David.