Shirley
felt they were clear and gentle; and Caroline's eyes, encountering Mr.
Moore's, confessed they were manly and searching. Each acknowledged the
charm in his or her own way. Moore smiled slightly, and Caroline
coloured as slightly. Mr. Helstone could, on the spot, have rated them
both. They annoyed him. Why? Impossible to say. If you had asked him
what Moore merited at that moment, he would have said a "horsewhip;" if
you had inquired into Caroline's deserts, he would have adjudged her a
box on the ear; if you had further demanded the reason of such
chastisements, he would have stormed against flirtation and
love-making, and vowed he would have no such folly going on under his
roof.
These private considerations, combined with political reasons, fixed his
resolution of separating the cousins. He announced his will to Caroline
one evening as she was sitting at work near the drawing-room window. Her
face was turned towards him, and the light fell full upon it. It had
struck him a few minutes before that she was looking paler and quieter
than she used to look. It had not escaped him either that Robert Moore's
name had never, for some three weeks past, dropped from her lips; nor
during the same space of time had that personage made his appearance at
the rectory. Some suspicion of clandestine meetings haunted his mind.
Having but an indifferent opinion of women, he always suspected them. He
thought they needed constant watching. It was in a tone dryly
significant he desired her to cease her daily visits to the Hollow. He
expected a start, a look of depreciation. The start he saw, but it was a
very slight one; no look whatever was directed to him.
"Do you hear me?" he asked.
"Yes, uncle."
"Of course you mean to attend to what I say?"
"Yes, certainly."
"And there must be no letter-scribbling to your cousin Hortense--no
intercourse whatever. I do not approve of the principles of the family.
They are Jacobinical."
"Very well," said Caroline quietly. She acquiesced then. There was no
vexed flushing of the face, no gathering tears; the shadowy
thoughtfulness which had covered her features ere Mr. Helstone spoke
remained undisturbed; she was obedient.
Yes, perfectly; because the mandate coincided with her own previous
judgment; because it was now become pain to her to go to Hollow's
Cottage; nothing met her there but disappointment. Hope and love had
quitted that little tenement, for Robert seemed to have deserted its
precincts. Whenever she asked after him--which she very seldom did,
since the mere utterance of his name made her face grow hot--the answer
was, he was from home, or he was quite taken up with business. Hortense
feared he was killing himself by application. He scarcely ever took a
meal in the house; he lived in the counting-house.
At church only Caroline had the chance of seeing him, and there she
rarely looked at him. It was both too much pain and too much pleasure
to look--it excited too much emotion; and that it was all wasted emotion
she had learned well to comprehend.
Once, on a dark, wet Sunday, when there were few people at church, and
when especially certain ladies were absent, of whose observant faculties
and tomahawk tongues Caroline stood in awe, she had allowed her eye to
seek Robert's pew, and to rest awhile on its occupant. He was there
alone. Hortense had been kept at home by prudent considerations relative
to the rain and a new spring _chapeau_. During the sermon he sat with
folded arms and eyes cast down, looking very sad and abstracted. When
depressed, the very hue of his face seemed more dusk than when he
smiled, and to-day cheek and forehead wore their most tintless and sober
olive. By instinct Caroline knew, as she examined that clouded
countenance, that his thoughts were running in no familiar or kindly
channel; that they were far away, not merely from her, but from all
which she could comprehend, or in which she could sympathize. Nothing
that they had ever talked of together was now in his mind: he was wrapt
from her by interests and responsibilities in which it was deemed such
as she could have no part.
Caroline meditated in her own way on the subject; speculated on his
feelings, on his life, on his fears, on his fate; mused over the mystery
of "business," tried to comprehend more about it than had ever been told
her--to understand its perplexities, liabilities, duties, exactions;
endeavoured to realize the state of mind of a "man of business," to
enter into it, feel what he would feel, aspire to what he would aspire.
Her earnest wish was to see things as they were, and not to be romantic.
By dint of effort she contrived to get a glimpse of the light of truth
here and there, and hoped that scant ray might suffice to guide her.
"Different, indeed," she concluded, "is Robert's mental condition to
mine. I think only of him; he has no room, no leisure, to think of me.
The feeling called love is and has been for two years the predominant
emotion of my heart--always there, always awake, always astir. Quite
other feelings absorb his reflections and govern his faculties. He is
rising now, going to leave the church, for service is over. Will he turn
his head towards this pew? No, not once. He has not one look for me.
That is hard. A kind glance would have made me happy till to-morrow. I
have not got it; he would not give it; he is gone. Strange that grief
should now almost choke me, because another human being's eye has failed
to greet mine."
That Sunday evening, Mr. Malone coming, as usual, to pass it with his
rector, Caroline withdrew after tea to her chamber. Fanny, knowing her
habits, had lit her a cheerful little fire, as the weather was so gusty
and chill. Closeted there, silent and solitary, what could she do but
think? She noiselessly paced to and fro the carpeted floor, her head
drooped, her hands folded. It was irksome to sit; the current of
reflection ran rapidly through her mind; to-night she was mutely
excited.
Mute was the room, mute the house. The double door of the study muffled
the voices of the gentlemen. The servants were quiet in the kitchen,
engaged with books their young mistress had lent them--books which she
had told them were "fit for Sunday reading." And she herself had another
of the same sort open on the table, but she could not read it. Its
theology was incomprehensible to her, and her own mind was too busy,
teeming, wandering, to listen to the language of another mind.
Then, too, her imagination was full of pictures--images of Moore, scenes
where he and she had been together; winter fireside sketches; a glowing
landscape of a hot summer afternoon passed with him in the bosom of
Nunnely Wood; divine vignettes of mild spring or mellow autumn moments,
when she had sat at his side in Hollow's Copse, listening to the call of
the May cuckoo, or sharing the September treasure of nuts and ripe
blackberries--a wild dessert which it was her morning's pleasure to
collect in a little basket, and cover with green leaves and fresh
blossoms, and her afternoon's delight to administer to Moore, berry by
berry, and nut by nut, like a bird feeding its fledgling.
Robert's features and form were with her; the sound of his voice was
quite distinct in her ear; his few caresses seemed renewed. But these
joys, being hollow, were, ere long, crushed in. The pictures faded, the
voice failed, the visionary clasp melted chill from her hand, and where
the warm seal of lips had made impress on her forehead, it felt now as
if a sleety rain-drop had fallen. She returned from an enchanted region
to the real world: for Nunnely Wood in June she saw her narrow chamber;
for the songs of birds in alleys she heard the rain on her casement; for
the sigh of the south wind came the sob of the mournful east; and for
Moore's manly companionship she had the thin illusion of her own dim
shadow on the wall. Turning from the pale phantom which reflected
herself in its outline, and her reverie in the drooped attitude of its
dim head and colourless tresses, she sat down--inaction would suit the
frame of mind into which she was now declining--she said to herself, "I
have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good
health; half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to
occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads
between me and the grave?"
She reflected.
"I shall not be married, it appears," she continued. "I suppose, as
Robert does not care for me, I shall never have a husband to love, nor
little children to take care of. Till lately I had reckoned securely on
the duties and affections of wife and mother to occupy my existence. I
considered, somehow, as a matter of course, that I was growing up to the
ordinary destiny, and never troubled myself to seek any other; but now I
perceive plainly I may have been mistaken. Probably I shall be an old
maid. I shall live to see Robert married to some one else, some rich
lady. I shall never marry. What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my
place in the world?"
She mused again.
"Ah! I see," she pursued presently; "that is the question which most old
maids are puzzled to solve. Other people solve it for them by saying,
'Your place is to do good to others, to be helpful whenever help is
wanted.' That is right in some measure, and a very convenient doctrine
for the people who hold it; but I perceive that certain sets of human
beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their
lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise;
they call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live? Is
there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that
existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your
own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation
of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak
concession creates selfishness. The Romish religion especially teaches
renunciation of self, submission to others, and nowhere are found so
many grasping tyrants as in the ranks of the Romish priesthood. Each
human being has his share of rights. I suspect it would conduce to the
happiness and welfare of all if each knew his allotment, and held to it
as tenaciously as the martyr to his creed. Queer thoughts these that
surge in my mind. Are they right thoughts? I am not certain.
"Well, life is short at the best. Seventy years, they say, pass like a
vapour, like a dream when one awaketh; and every path trod by human feet
terminates in one bourne--the grave, the little chink in the surface of
this great globe, the furrow where the mighty husbandman with the scythe
deposits the seed he has shaken from the ripe stem; and there it falls,
decays, and thence it springs again, when the world has rolled round a
few times more. So much for the body. The soul meantime wings its long
flight upward, folds its wings on the brink of the sea of fire and
glass, and gazing down through the burning clearness, finds there
mirrored the vision of the Christian's triple Godhead--the sovereign
Father, the mediating Son, the Creator Spirit. Such words, at least,
have been chosen to express what is inexpressible, to describe what
baffles description. The soul's real hereafter who shall guess?"
Her fire was decayed to its last cinder; Malone had departed; and now
the study bell rang for prayers.
The next day Caroline had to spend altogether alone, her uncle being
gone to dine with his friend Dr. Boultby, vicar of Whinbury. The whole
time she was talking inwardly in the same strain--looking forwards,
asking what she was to do with life. Fanny, as she passed in and out of
the room occasionally, intent on housemaid errands, perceived that her