A new experience had come to Mrs. Wylder. Her passion over the death
of her son; her constant and prolonged contention with her husband; her
protest against him whom she called the Almighty; the public consequence
of the same; these, and the reaction from all these, had resulted in
a sudden sinking of the vital forces, so that she who had been like a
burning fiery furnace, was now like a heap of cooling ashes on a hearth,
with the daylight coming in. She had not only never known what illness
was, she did not even know what it was to feel unfit. Her consciousness
of health was so clear, so unmixed, so unencountered, that she had never
had a conception, a thought, a notion of what even that health was.
Power and strength had so constantly seemed part of her known self, that
she never thought of them: they were never far enough from her to be
seen by her; she did not suspect them as other than herself, or dream
that they could be disjoined from her. She could think only in the
person of a strong woman; she was aware only of the being of a strong
woman. Even after she had been some time helpless in bed, as often as
she thought of anything she would like to do, it was the act of trying
to get up and do it that made her aware afresh that she was no more
the woman corresponding to her consciousness of herself. For her
consciousness had never yet presented her as she really was, but always
through the conditional and non-essential, so that by accidents only was
she characterized to herself. Now she was too feeble even to care for
the loss of her strength; her weakness went too deep to be felt as an
oppression, for it met with no antagonism. Her inability to move was now
no prison, and her attendant was no slave with tardy feet, but an angel
of God.
For her Bab was now the mother's one delight. Her love for her lost twin
had been in great part favouritism, partisanship, defence, opposition;
her love for Barbara was all tenderness and no pride. In her self-lack
she clung to her--as lordly dame, who had taken her castle for part of
herself, and impregnable, but, its walls crumbling under the shot of
the enemy, found herself defenceless before her captors, might turn and
clasp her little maid, suppliant for protection. Good is it that we are
not what we seem to ourselves “in our hours of ease,” for then we should
never seek the Father! The loss of all that the world counts _first
things_ is a thousandfold repaid in the mere waking to higher need. It
proves the presence of the divine in the lower good, that its loss is
so potent. A man may send his gaze over the clear heaven, and suspect no
God; when the stifling cloud comes down, folds itself about him, shuts
from him the expanse of the universe, he begins to long for a hand, a
sign, some shadow of presence. Mrs. Wylder had not got so far as this
yet, but she had sought refuge in love; and what is the love of
child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another
being--which is a being just because he shines through it. This was the
one important result of her illness, that, finding refuge in the love
of her daughter, she loved her daughter. The next point in her eternal
growth would be to love the God who made the child she loved, and whose
love shone upon her through the child. By nature she was a strong woman
whom passion made weak. It sucked at her will till first it hardened it
to a more selfish determination, then pulped it to a helpless obstinacy.
The persistence that goes with inclination has its force only from the
weakness of pride and the mean worship of self; it is the opposite
of that free will which is the reflex of the divine will, and the
ministering servant-power to all freedom, which resists and subdues the
self of inclination, and is obedient only to the self of duty. Where the
temple of God has no windows, earthquake must rend the roof, that the
sunlight may enter. Barbara's mother lay broken on her couch that the
spirit of the daughter might enter the soul of her mother--and with it
the spirit of him who, in the heart of her daughter, made her that which
she was.
Her illness had lasted a month, when one day her husband, at Barbara's
prayer coming to see her, she feebly put out her hand asking for his,
and for a moment the divine child in the man opened its heavenly eyes.
He took the offered hand kindly, faltered a gentle-sounding commonplace
or two, and left her happier, with a strange little bird fluttering in
his own bosom. There are eggs of all the heavenly birds in our bosoms,
and the history of man is the incubation and hatching of these eggs.
She began to recover, but the recovery was a long one. As soon as she
thought her well enough, Barbara told her that Mr. Wingfold had been to
inquire after her almost every day, and asked whether she would not like
to see him. Mrs. Wylder was in a quiescent condition, non-combatant,
involving no real betterment, occasioned only by the absence of impulse.
But such a condition gives opportunity for the good, the gentle, the
loving, to be felt, and so recognized. The sufferer resembles a child
that has not been tempted, whose trial is yet to come. With recovery,
fresh claim will be put in by the powers of good. This claim will be
resisted by old habit, resuming its force in the return of physical
and psychical health,--and then comes the tug of war. For no one can be
saved, as he who knows his master would be saved, without the will
being supreme in the matter, without the choosing to fulfill all
righteousness, to resist the wrong, to do the right. Wingfold never
built much on bed-repentance. The aphorism of the devil sick and the
devil well, is only too true. But he welcomed the fresh opportunity for
a beginning. He knew that pain and sickness do rub some dirt from the
windows toward the infinite, and that things of the old unknown world
whence we came, do sometimes look in at them, a moment now, and a moment
then, waking new old things that lie in every child born into the world.
I seem to see the great marshes where the souls go wandering about after
the bog-fires; a kiss blown from the walls of the city comes wavering
down among them; it flits hither and thither with the dead-lights; it
finds a soul with a spot on which it can alight; it settles there; and
kisses it alive. God is the God of patience, and waits and waits for the
child who keeps him waiting and will not open the door.
Wingfold went to see her, but took good care to press nothing upon her.
He let her give him the lead. She spoke of her weakness, and the parson
drew out her moan. She praised her Barbara, and the parson praised her
again in words that opened the mother's eyes to new beauties in her
daughter. She mentioned her weariness, and the parson spoke of the
fields and the soft wind and the yellow shine of the butter-cups in the
grass. Her heart was gently drawn to the man whose eyes were so keen,
whose voice was so mellow and strong, and whose words were so lovely
sweet, saying the things that were in her own heart, but would not come
out.
One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not
say what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He
thought he knew what he was about. The good in a _true_ book, he would
say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its
wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of
a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true
reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The
general sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little
by the story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should
succeed in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well
as a big heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense
of wrong. She had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon
ceased even the show of returning her affection,
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught,
a struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil
in another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet
her first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter,
and her one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to
open to her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it,
make another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was
that of the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out
the thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those
thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine
musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought
the tunes came alive in their own air--as indeed they did, only another
hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his
own feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it
unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went
without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but
tending to the devilish.
Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a
great flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that
the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to
question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it
was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell
her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her,
and what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one
day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at
Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out,
and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady
Ann's tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she
was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was
no hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be
sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would
hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on
her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.
The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very
sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound
reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn
from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask
them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear
common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish
the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as
Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more
useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his
wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault
she had in the eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with
affectation or humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing
that might coexist with it, the needful chance.
So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable,
unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive
as inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to
be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As
undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally
perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the
renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a
phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and
the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind
hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the
new birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all
beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her
war was to come.
Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she
arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady
Ann, Mrs. Wylder was insufferable--a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman,
purse-proud and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady
Ann vastly inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady
Ann was the superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her
self-assured pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation
far more objectionable than Mrs. Wylder's abrupt movements, or the
rough and ready speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of
a matter. Even the look that would kill a man if it could, never roused
such hate as sprang to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship.
Many a man with no admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge
in Mrs. Wylder's plump face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the
moveless pallor of lady Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched
thinness of her fine, poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils,
the very outcry of inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide
of a surging breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will
at length make strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out
those nostrils? Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of
a fearless, bountiful, redeeming woman.
Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time.
She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had
in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. “Stuck-up kangaroo!”
she cried her.
“I'll lay you my best sapphire,” she said to her daughter, in the
hearing of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, “that for the
last three hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own
young!”
Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann's
exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was
caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as
in that of the doctor's wife, who happened to be in the room when lady
Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the
distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father's
having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance!
Arthur had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him!
She must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She
was anxious also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her
continuous absence from Mortgrange.
Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann
imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself
agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara
in such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless--not to her son,
or to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the
money to be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake
of her complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and
ride over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and
health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt
her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because
she was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners,
grew importunate, Barbara flatly refused.
“You must pardon me, lady Ann,” she said; “I cannot, and I will not
leave my mother.”
Then lady Ann thought it might be wise to make a little more of the
mother to whom she seemed so devoted. She had imagined the daughter
of the coarse woman must feel toward her as she did, and suspected a
coarser grain in the daughter than she had supposed, because she was not
disgusted with her mother. She did not know that eyes of love see the
true being where other eyes see only its shadow; and shadows differ a
good deal from their bodies.
But meeting Mr. Wylder in the avenue as she returned, and stopping her
carriage to speak to him, lady Ann changed her mind, and resolved to
curry favour with the husband instead of the wife. For hitherto she
had scarcely seen Mr. Wylder, and knew about him only by unfavourable
hearsay; but she was charmed with him now, and drew from him a promise
to go and dine at Mortgrange.
Bab went singing back to her mother, who was never so ill that she did
not like to hear her voice. She could not always bear it in the room,
but outside she was never tired of it. So Bab went about the house
singing like a mavis. But she never passed a servant, male or female,
without ceasing her song to say a kind word; and her mother, who, now
that she had got on a little, lay listening with her keenest of ears,
knew by the checks and changes of Bab's song, something of what was
going on in the house. If one asked Bab what made her so happy, she
would answer that she had nothing to make her unhappy; and there was
more philosophy in the answer than may at first appear. For certainly
the normal condition of humanity is happiness, and the thing that should
be enough to make us happy, is simply the absence of anything to make us
unhappy.
“Everything,” she would answer another time, “is making me happy.”
“I think I _am_ happiness,” she said once.
How could she _naturally_ be other than happy, seeing she came of
happiness! “Il lieto fattore,” says Dante; “whose happy-making sight,”
says Milton.
Mr. Wylder went and dined with sir Wilton and lady Ann. The latter did
her poor best to please him, and was successful. It had always been an
annoyance to Mr. Wylder that his wife was not a lady. In the bush he did
not feel it; but now he saw, as well as knew, wherein she was inferior,
and did not see wherein she excelled. It was the more consolation to
him that lady Ann praised his daughter, her beauty, her manners, her
wit--praised her for everything, in short, that she thought hers, and
for some things she thought were not hers. But she hinted that it would
be of the greatest benefit to Barbara to have the next season in London.
The girl had met nobody, and might, in her ignorance and innocence,
being such an eager, impetuous, warm-hearted creature, with her powers
of discrimination of course but little cultivated, make unsuitable
friendships that would lead to entanglement; while, well chaperoned, she
might become one of the first ladies in the county. She took care to let
her father know at the same time, or think he knew, that, although her
son would be only a baronet, he would be rich, for the estates were in
excellent condition and free of encumbrance; and hinted that there was
now a fine chance of enlarging the property, neighbouring land being in
the market at a low price.
Mr. Wylder had indeed hoped for a higher match, but lady Ann, being
an earl's daughter, had influence with him. The remaining twin was so
delicate that it was very doubtful if he would succeed: if he did
not, and land could be had between to connect the two properties of
Mortgrange and Wylder, the estate would be far the finest in the county;
when, as lady Ann hinted, means might be used to draw down the favour of
Providence in the form of a patent of nobility.
To lady Ann, London was the centre of love-making, and Arthur, she said
to herself, would show to better advantage there than in the country.
The place where she had herself been nearest to falling in love, was a
ball-room: the heat apparently had half thawed her.
Mr. Wylder thought lady Ann was right, and the best thing for Barbara
would be to go to London: lady Ann would present her at court, and she
would doubtless be the belle of the season. Her chance would be none the
worse of making a better match than with Arthur Lestrange.
It may seem odd that a like reflection did not occur to lady Ann: far
more eligible men than her son might well be drawn to such a bit of
sunshine as Barbara; but just what in Barbara was most attractive, lady
Ann was least capable of appreciating.