worse she will take it."
"I will talk with her to-morrow," replied Mrs. Murray; and the next
day, when she went to take Esther to drive in the afternoon, her niece
received her with an embarrassed air and a high color, and said:
"Aunt! I have something to tell you."
"Good heavens!" gasped Mrs. Murray.
"I am engaged to Mr. Hazard."
_Chapter VII_
The instant Esther felt herself really loved, she met her fate as women
will when the shock is once over. Hazard had wanted her to love him, had
pursued and caught her. Now when she turned to him and answered his
call, she seemed to take possession of him and lift him up. By the time
he left her house this Saturday evening, he felt that he had found a
soul stronger and warmer than his own, and was already a little afraid
of it. Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in
calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is
startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
Esther herself was more astonished than Hazard at the force of this
feeling which swept her away. She suddenly found herself passionately
attached to a man, whom, down to the last moment, she had thought she
could never marry, and now could no more imagine life without him than
she could conceive of loving any one else. For the moment she thought
that his profession was nothing to her; she could believe whatever he
believed and do whatever he did; and if her love, backed by her will,
were not strong enough to make his life her own, she cared little what
became of her, and could look with indifference on life itself. So far
as she was concerned she thought herself ready to worship Woden or Thor,
if he did.
The next morning she could not let him preach without being near him,
and she made Catherine go with her to St. John's. They took their seats,
not in her own pew but in a corner, where no one should notice them
under their veils. The experiment was full of peril, though Esther did
not know it. This new excitement, coming so swiftly after a fortnight of
exhaustion, threw her back into a state of extreme nervousness. Of
course the scene of Saturday evening was followed by a sleepless night,
and when Sunday morning came, her very restlessness made her hope that
she should find repose and calm within the walls of the church. She went
believing that she needed nothing so much as the quieting influence of
the service, and she was not disappointed, for her sweetest
associations were here, and as she glanced timidly up to the
scaffolding where her romance had been acted, she felt at home and
happy, in spite of the crowd of people who swarmed about her and
separated her from the things she loved. In the background stood the
solemn and awful associations of the last few weeks, the mysteries and
terrors of death, drawing her from thought of earthly things to visions
of another world. Full of these deep feelings, saturated with the elixir
of love, Esther succumbed to the first notes of the church music. Tears
of peaceful delight stood in her eyes. She glanced up towards her
Cecilia on the distant wall, wondering at its childishness. How deep a
meaning she could give it now, and how religious a feeling!
She was not conscious of rustling silks or waving feathers; she hardly
saw the swarm of fashionable people about her; it seemed to her that her
old life had vanished as though she were dead; her soul might have taken
shelter in the body of some gray linnet for all that she thought or
cared about the vanities of human society. She wanted only to be loved
and to love, without being thought of, or noticed; to nestle in her own
corner, and let the world go by.
Unluckily the world would not go by. This world which she wanted to keep
at arms' length, was at church once for all, and meant to stay there; it
felt itself at home, and she, with her exclusive griefs and joys, was
the stranger. So long as the music lasted, all was sympathetic enough,
but when Mr. Hazard read the service, he seemed far-off and strange. He
belonged not to her but to the world; a thousand people had rights of
property in him, soul and body, and called their claim religion. What
had she to do with it? Parts of the service jarred on her ear. She began
to take a bitter pleasure in thinking that she had nothing, not even
religious ideas, in common with these people who came between her and
her lover. Her fatigue steadily worked on her nerves. By the time the
creed was read, she could not honestly feel that she believed a word of
it, or could force herself to say that she ever should believe it.
With fading self-confidence she listened to the sermon. It was
beautiful, simple, full of feeling and even of passion, but she felt
that it was made for her, and she shrank before the thousand people who
were thus let into the secret chambers of her heart. It treated of death
and its mystery, covering ignorance with a veil of religious hope, and
ending with an invocation of infinite love so intense in feeling and
expression that, beautiful as it was, Esther forgot its beauties in the
fear that the next word would reveal her to the world. This sort of
publicity was new to her, and threw her back on herself until religion
was forgotten in the alarm. She became more jealous than ever. What
business had these strangers with her love? Why should she share it with
them? When the service was over, she hurried Catherine away so quickly
that they were both at home before the church was fairly empty.
This was the end of her short happiness. She knew that through the
church door lay the only road to her duty and peace of mind. To see that
the first happy impression had lasted barely half an hour, and instead
of bringing peace, had brought irritation, was cause enough to alarm the
most courageous young woman who ever rushed into the maelstrom of
matrimony.
When they had reached home, she flung herself into a chair and covered
her face with her hands.
"Catherine!" said she solemnly; "what am I to do? I don't like church."
"You would like your's amazingly," said Catherine, "if you had ever been
to mine."
"Was your's worse?"
"If Mrs. Murray hadn't improved my manners so much, I should smile. Was
mine worse? I wish you and Mr. Hazard would try it for a change. Mrs.
Dyer would like to see you both undergoing discipline. Never joke about
serious matters! You had better hold your tongue and be glad to live in
a place where your friends let your soul alone."
"But I can't sit still and hear myself turned into a show! I can't share
him with all Fifth Avenue. I want no one else to have him. To see him
there devoting himself and me to a stupid crowd of people, who have as
much right to him as I have, drives religion out of my head."
Catherine treated this weakness with high contempt.
"I might as well be jealous," said she, "of the people who look at Mr.
Wharton's pictures, or read Petrarch's sonnets in my sweet translation.
Did you ever hear that Laura found fault with Petrarch, or, if she did,
that any one believed she was in earnest?"
"It is not the same thing," said Esther. "He believes in his church more
than he does in me. If I can't believe in it, he will have to give me
up."
"He, give you up!" said Catherine. "The poor saint! You know he is silly
about you."
"He must give me up, if I am jealous of his congregation, and won't
believe what he preaches," replied Esther mournfully.
"Why should you care what he preaches?" asked Catherine; "you never
heard your aunt troubling her head about what Mr. Murray says when he
goes to court."
"She is not forced to go to court with him," said Esther; "nor to be a
mother to all the old women in the court-room; nor to say that she
believes--believes--believes--when in her heart she doesn't believe a
word."
Hazard appeared in the middle of this dispute, and Esther, troubled as
she was, could not bear to distress him. She still meant to accept every
thing and force herself to follow him in silence; she would go where he
led, and never once raise her eyes to look for the horizon. As she said
to herself quite seriously, though with a want of reverence that augured
ill; "I will go down on my knees and help him, though he turn Bonze and
burn incense to Buddha in my very studio!" His presence always soothed
her. His gayety and affection never failed to revive her spirits and
confidence.
"Wasn't it a good sermon?" said he to Catherine as he came in, with his
boyish laugh of triumph. "Give me a little praise! I never got a word of
encouragement from you in my life."
"I should as soon think of encouraging a whole herd of Texas cattle,"
answered Catherine. "What good can my praise do you?"
"You child of nature, don't you know that children of nature like you
always grow wild and need no cultivation, but that we artificial flowers
can't live without it?"
"I don't know how to cultivate," answered Catherine; "it is Esther you
are thinking about."
Having announced this self-evident fact, Catherine walked off and left
him to quiet Esther's alarms as he could. As she went she heard him turn
to Esther and repeat his prayer that she should be gentle with him and
give his sermon a word of praise.
"How can I stop to think whether it is good or not," said Esther, "when
I hear you telling all our secrets to our whole visiting list? I could
think of nothing but myself, and how I could get away."
"And whose secrets can I tell if not our own?" asked Hazard triumphant.
While he was with her Esther was peaceful and happy, but no sooner had
he gone than her terrors began again.
"He will find me out, Catherine, and it will break my heart," she said.
"I never knew I had a jealous temper. I am horribly narrow-minded. I'm
not fit for him, and I knew it when he asked me. He will hate me when he
finds what a wife he has got."
Catherine, who positively declined to recognize Mr. Hazard's superiority
of mind over Esther, took this with unshaken fortitude. "If you can
stand it, I guess he can," she remarked curtly. "Where do you expect the
poor man to get a wife, if all of us say we are not fit for him?"
This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long--the
matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it
more serious still. Try which way she would there was no escape from her
anxiety. Hazard, who had foreseen some trouble from her old associations
with loose religious opinion, had taken it for granted, with his usual
self-confidence, that from the moment she came within the reach of his
faith and took a place by his side she would find no difficulties that
he could not easily overcome. "Love is the great magnet of life, and
Religion," he said "is Love." Nothing could be simpler than his plan, as
he explained to her. She had but to trust herself to him and all was
sure to go well. So long as he was with her and could gently thrust
aside every idea but that of their own happiness, all went as well as he
promised; but unluckily for his plan, Esther had all her life been used
to act for herself and to order others rather than take orders of any
sort. The more confidently Hazard told her to leave every thing to him,
the less it occurred to her to do so. She could no more allow him to
come into her life and take charge of her thoughts than to go down into
her kitchen and take charge of her cook. He might reason with her by the
hour, and quite convince her that nothing was of the least consequence
provided it were left entirely in his hands, but the moment he was out
of sight she forgot that he was to be the keeper of her conscience, and,
without a thought of her dependence, she resumed the charge of her own
affairs.
Her first idea was to learn something of theology, in the hope of
settling her foolish and ignorant doubts as to her fitness for her new
position. No sooner did the thought occur to her than she set to work,
like a young divinity student, to fit herself for her new calling. Her
father's library contained a number of theological books, but these were
of a kind that suited Mr. Dudley's way of thinking rather than that of
the early fathers. As Esther knew nothing at all about the subject,
except what she had gathered from listening to conversation, one book
seemed to her as good as another, provided it dealt with the matter that
interested her; but when Hazard came in and found her seated on a sofa,
with a pile of these works about her, his hair rose on end, and he was
forced gently to take them away under the promise of bringing her others
of a more correct kind. These in their turn seemed to her not quite
clear, and she asked for others still. He found himself, without
warning, on the brink of a theological abyss. Unwilling to worry him;
eager to accept whatever he told her he believed, but in despair at each
failure to understand what it was, Esther became more and more
uncomfortable and terrified.
"What would you do, Catherine, if you were in my place?" she asked.
"Let it alone!" said Catherine. "You didn't ask him to marry you. If he
wants you, it's his business to suit himself to you."
"But I must go to his church," said Esther, "and sit at his communion."
"How many people at his church could tell you what they believe?" asked
Catherine. "Your religion is just as good as theirs as long as you don't
know what it is."
"One learns theology fast when one is engaged to be married," said
Esther with a repentant face.
She was already sorry that she had tried to learn any thing about the
subject, for she already knew too much, and yet a terrible fascination
impelled her to read on about the nature of the trinity and the
authority of tradition, until she lost patience with her own stupidity
and burned to know what other people had to say on such matters. It
occurred to her that she should like to have a quiet talk with George
Strong.
Meanwhile Mrs. Murray, panic-stricken at learning the engagement, had
sent at once for George. The messenger reached him on Sunday evening, a
few hours after Esther told her aunt. Mystified by the urgent tone of
Mrs. Murray's note, Strong came up at once, and found his uncle and aunt
alone, after dinner, in their parlor, where Mr. Murray was quietly
smoking a cigar, while his wife was holding a book in her hand and
looking hard into the fire.
"George!" said his aunt solemnly; "do you know the mischief you and your
friends have done?"
Strong stared. "You don't mean to tell me that Catherine has run off
with Wharton?" said he. "She can't have done it, for I left Wharton not
fifteen minutes ago at the club."
"No, not that! thank Heaven! Though if she hadn't more head than ever he
had, that French wife of his might have given her more unhappiness than
he is worth. No, it's not that! Catherine is the only sensible creature
in the family."
Strong glared into the fire for a moment with a troubled air, and then
looked at his aunt again. "No!" said he. "Esther hasn't joined the
church. It can't be!"
"Yes!" said Mrs. Murray grimly.
"Caramba!" growled Strong, with a profusion of Spanish gutturals. Then
after a moment's reflection, he added: "Poor child! Why should I care?"
"You irritate me more than your uncle does," broke out Mrs. Murray, at
last losing patience. "Do you think I should be so distressed if Esther
had only joined the church? I should like nothing better. What has
happened is very different. She is engaged to Mr. Hazard."
Strong broke into a laugh, and Mr. Murray, with a quiet chuckle of
humor, took his cigar out of his mouth to say:
"Let me explain this little matter to you, George! What troubles your
aunt is not so much that Esther has joined the church as that she fears
the church has joined Esther."
"The church has struck it rich this time;" remarked Strong without a
sign of his first alarm. "Now we'll see what they'll make of her."
"The matter is too serious for joking;" said Mrs. Murray. "Either Esther
will be unhappy for life, or Mr. Hazard will leave his church, or they
will both be miserable whatever they do. I think you are bound to
prevent it, since you are the one most to blame for getting them into
it."
"I don't want to prevent it;" replied Strong. "It's a case of survival
for the fittest. If Hazard can manage to convert Esther, let him do it.
If not, let her take him in charge and convert him if she can. I'll not
interfere."
"That is just the remark I had the honor to make to your aunt as you
came in," said Mr. Murray. "Yesterday I wanted to stop it. To-day I want
to leave it alone. They are both of them old enough to manage their own
case. It has risen now to the dignity of a great cause, and I will be
the devil's advocate."
"You are both of you intolerable," said Mrs. Murray, impatiently. "You
talk about the happiness of Esther's life as though it were a game of
poker. Tell me, George! what kind of a man is Mr. Hazard at heart?"
"Hazard is a priest at heart," replied Strong. "He has the qualities and
faults of his class. I understand how this thing happened. He sees
nothing good in the world that he does not instantly covet for the glory
of God and the church, and just a bit for his own pleasure. He saw
Esther; she struck him as something out of his line, for he is used to
young women who work altar-cloths; he found that Wharton and I liked
her; he thought that such material was too good for heathen like us; so
he fell in love with her himself and means to turn her into a
candlestick of the church. I don't mind. Let him try! He has done what
he liked with us all his life. I have worked like a dog for him and his
church because he was my friend. Now he will see whether he has met his
match. I double you up all round on Esther."
"You men are simply brutal!" said his aunt. "Esther will be an unhappy
woman all her life, whether she marries him or not, and you sit there
and will not raise a finger to help her."
"Let him convert her, I say;" repeated Strong. "What is your objection
to that, aunt Sarah?"
"My objection is that the whole family is only a drove of mules," said
Mrs. Murray. "Poor Mr. Hazard does not know what he is undertaking."
"Is Esther very much in love?" asked Strong.
"You know her well enough to know that she would never have accepted him
if she were not;" replied Mrs. Murray. "He has hunted her down when she
was unhappy, and he is going to make her more unhappy still."
"I guess you're right," said Strong, seriously. "The struggle is going
to tear both their poor little hearts out; but what can we do about it?
None of us are to blame."
"Ah, George!" exclaimed his aunt. "You are the one most to blame. You
should have married Esther yourself, and you had not wit enough to see
that while you went dancing round the world, as though such women were
plenty as your old fossil toads, the only woman you will ever meet who
could have made you happy, was slipping through your fingers, and you
hadn't the strength to hold her."
"I own it, aunt Sarah!" said George, and this time he spoke seriously
enough to satisfy her. "If I could have fallen in love with Esther and
she with me, I believe it would have been better for both of us than
that she should marry a high-church parson and I go on digging bones;
but some things are too obvious. You can't get a spark without some
break in your conductor. I was ready enough to fall in love with Esther,
but one can't do that kind of thing in cold blood."
"Well," said Mrs. Murray with a sigh. "You have lost her now, and Mr.
Hazard will lose her too. You and he and all your friends are a sort of
clever children. We are always expecting you to do something worth
doing, and it never comes. You are a sort of water-color, worsted-work,
bric-à-brac, washed-out geniuses, just big enough and strong enough to
want to do something and never carry it through. I am heartily tired of
the whole lot of you, and now I must set to work and get these two girls
out of your hands."
"Do you mean to break up this engagement?" asked Strong, who was used
to his aunt's criticisms and never answered them.
"The engagement will break itself up," replied his aunt. "It will have
to be kept private for a few weeks on account of her father's death and
her mourning, and you will see that it never will be announced. If I
can, I shall certainly do all in my power to break it up."
"You will?" said Strong. "Well! I mean to do just the contrary. If
Esther wants Hazard she shall have him, if I can help her. Why not?
Hazard is a good fellow, and will make her a good husband. I have no
fault to find with him except that he poaches outside his preserves. He
has poached this time to some purpose, but if the parish can stand it, I
can."
"The parish cannot stand it," said Mrs. Murray. "They are saying very
ugly things already about Esther."
"Then it will not hurt my feelings to see Hazard snub his congregation,"
replied Strong angrily.
The family conclave ended here, and all parties henceforward fixed their
eyes intently on the drama. Mrs. Murray waited with a woman's instinct
for her moment to come. Strong tried to counteract her influence by
bungling efforts to make the lovers' path smooth. Catherine was a sort
of cushion against which all the billiard balls of the game knocked
themselves in succession, leaving her cool and elastic temper
undisturbed. Three more days passed without throwing much new light on
the disputed question whether the engagement could last, except that
Esther seemed clearly more anxious and restless. Mr. Hazard was with her
several hours every day and watched over her with extreme vigilance.
Mrs. Murray took her to drive every afternoon and not a glance of
Esther's eyes escaped scrutiny. Strong stopped once or twice at the
house but had no chance to interfere until on Thursday morning, his aunt
told him that Esther was rapidly getting into a state of mind that must
soon bring on a crisis.
"She cannot possibly make it do," said Mrs. Murray. "She is worrying
herself to death already. Mr. Hazard ought to see that she can't marry
him."
"She will marry him," answered Strong coolly. "Three women out of four
think they can't marry a man at first, but when they come to parting
with him, they learn better."
"He is passably selfish, your Mr. Hazard. If he thought a little more
of his parish, he would not want to put over them a woman like Esther
who has not a quality suited to the place."
"Her qualities are excellent," contradicted Strong. "Once in harness she
will be kind and gentle, a little tender-mouthed perhaps, and apt to shy
at first, but thorough-bred. He is quite right to take her if he can get
her, and what does his parish expect to do about it?"
"The first thing they will do about it will be to make Esther miserable.
They have begun to gossip already. A young man, even though he is a
clergyman, can't be seen always in company with a pretty woman, without
exciting remark. Only yesterday I was asked point-blank whether my niece
was engaged to Mr. Hazard."
"What did you say?"
"I told a lie of course, all the meaner because it was an equivocation.
I said that Mr. Hazard had not honored me with any communication on the
subject. I score up this first falsehood to his account."
"If you lie no better than that, Aunt Sarah, Hazard's conscience won't
trouble him much. When is the engagement to be out?"
"Very soon, at this rate. I thought that Esther, in common decency,
could not announce it for a week or two, but every one already suspects
it, and she will have to make it public within another week if she means
to do so at all. Now that she is her own mistress and lives by herself,
she can't have men so much about the house as she might if her father
were living."
"Do you seriously think she will break it off?" asked Strong
incredulously.
"I feel surer than ever," answered his aunt. "The criticism is going to
be bitter, and the longer Esther waits, the more sharply people will
talk. I should not wonder if it ended by driving Mr. Hazard out of the
parish. He is not strong enough to shock them much. Then Esther is
growing more and more nervous every day because the more she tries to
understand, the less she succeeds. Yesterday, when I took her to drive,
she was in tears about the atonement, and to-day I suppose she will
have gone to bed with a sick headache on account of the Athanasian
creed."
"I must talk with her," said Strong. "I think I can make some of those
things easier for her."
"You? I thought you laughed at them all."