Shirley
pressure on one worn-down point.
Soon she was content to spend whole days at Fieldhead, doing by turns
whatever Shirley or Mrs. Pryor wished her to do; and now one would claim
her, now the other. Nothing could be less demonstrative than the
friendship of the elder lady, but also nothing could be more vigilant,
assiduous, untiring. I have intimated that she was a peculiar personage,
and in nothing was her peculiarity more shown than in the nature of the
interest she evinced for Caroline. She watched all her movements; she
seemed as if she would have guarded all her steps. It gave her pleasure
to be applied to by Miss Helstone for advice and assistance. She yielded
her aid, when asked, with such quiet yet obvious enjoyment that Caroline
ere long took delight in depending on her.
Shirley Keeldar's complete docility with Mrs. Pryor had at first
surprised Miss Helstone, and not less the fact of the reserved
ex-governess being so much at home and at ease in the residence of her
young pupil, where she filled with such quiet independency a very
dependent post; but she soon found that it needed but to know both
ladies to comprehend fully the enigma. Every one, it seemed to her, must
like, must love, must prize Mrs. Pryor when they knew her. No matter
that she perseveringly wore old-fashioned gowns; that her speech was
formal and her manner cool; that she had twenty little ways such as
nobody else had: she was still such a stay, such a counsellor, so
truthful, so kind in her way, that, in Caroline's idea, none once
accustomed to her presence could easily afford to dispense with it.
As to dependency or humiliation, Caroline did not feel it in her
intercourse with Shirley, and why should Mrs. Pryor? The heiress was
rich--very rich--compared with her new friend: one possessed a clear
thousand a year, the other not a penny; and yet there was a safe sense
of equality experienced in her society, never known in that of the
ordinary Briarfield and Whinbury gentry.
The reason was, Shirley's head ran on other things than money and
position. She was glad to be independent as to property; by fits she was
even elated at the notion of being lady of the manor, and having tenants
and an estate. She was especially tickled with an agreeable complacency
when reminded of "all that property" down in the Hollow, "comprising an
excellent cloth-mill, dyehouse, warehouse, together with the messuage,
gardens, and outbuildings, termed Hollow's Cottage;" but her exultation
being quite undisguised was singularly inoffensive; and, for her serious
thoughts, they tended elsewhere. To admire the great, reverence the
good, and be joyous with the genial, was very much the bent of Shirley's
soul: she mused, therefore, on the means of following this bent far
oftener than she pondered on her social superiority.
In Caroline Miss Keeldar had first taken an interest because she was
quiet, retiring, looked delicate, and seemed as if she needed some one
to take care of her. Her predilection increased greatly when she
discovered that her own way of thinking and talking was understood and
responded to by this new acquaintance. She had hardly expected it. Miss
Helstone, she fancied, had too pretty a face, manners and voice too
soft, to be anything out of the common way in mind and attainments; and
she very much wondered to see the gentle features light up archly to the
reveille of a dry sally or two risked by herself; and more did she
wonder to discover the self-won knowledge treasured, and the untaught
speculations working in that girlish, curl-veiled head. Caroline's
instinct of taste, too, was like her own. Such books as Miss Keeldar had
read with the most pleasure were Miss Helstone's delight also. They held
many aversions too in common, and could have the comfort of laughing
together over works of false sentimentality and pompous pretension.
Few, Shirley conceived, men or women have the right taste in poetry, the
right sense for discriminating between what is real and what is false.
She had again and again heard very clever people pronounce this or that
passage, in this or that versifier, altogether admirable, which, when
she read, her soul refused to acknowledge as anything but cant,
flourish, and tinsel, or at the best elaborate wordiness, curious,
clever, learned, perhaps, haply even tinged with the fascinating hues of
fancy, but, God knows, as different from real poetry as the gorgeous and
massy vase of mosaic is from the little cup of pure metal; or, to give
the reader a choice of similes, as the milliner's artificial wreath is
from the fresh-gathered lily of the field.
Caroline, she found, felt the value of the true ore, and knew the
deception of the flashy dross. The minds of the two girls being toned in
harmony often chimed very sweetly together.
One evening they chanced to be alone in the oak-parlour. They had passed
a long wet day together without _ennui_. It was now on the edge of dark;
candles were not yet brought in; both, as twilight deepened, grew
meditative and silent. A western wind roared high round the hall,
driving wild clouds and stormy rain up from the far-remote ocean; all
was tempest outside the antique lattices, all deep peace within. Shirley
sat at the window, watching the rack in heaven, the mist on earth,
listening to certain notes of the gale that plained like restless
spirits--notes which, had she not been so young, gay, and healthy, would
have swept her trembling nerves like some omen, some anticipatory dirge.
In this her prime of existence and bloom of beauty they but subdued
vivacity to pensiveness. Snatches of sweet ballads haunted her ear; now
and then she sang a stanza. Her accents obeyed the fitful impulse of the
wind; they swelled as its gusts rushed on, and died as they wandered
away. Caroline, withdrawn to the farthest and darkest end of the room,
her figure just discernible by the ruby shine of the flameless fire,
was pacing to and fro, muttering to herself fragments of well-remembered
poetry. She spoke very low, but Shirley heard her; and while singing
softly, she listened. This was the strain:--
"Obscurest night involved the sky,
The Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I,
Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left."
Here the fragment stopped, because Shirley's song, erewhile somewhat
full and thrilling, had become delicately faint.
"Go on," said she.
"Then you go on too. I was only repeating 'The Castaway.'"
"I know. If you can remember it all, say it all."
And as it was nearly dark, and, after all, Miss Keeldar was no
formidable auditor, Caroline went through it. She went through it as she
should have gone through it. The wild sea, the drowning mariner, the
reluctant ship swept on in the storm, you heard were realized by her;
and more vividly was realized the heart of the poet, who did not weep
for "The Castaway," but who, in an hour of tearless anguish, traced a
semblance to his own God-abandoned misery in the fate of that
man-forsaken sailor, and cried from the depths where he struggled,--
"No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished--each alone!
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he."
"I hope William Cowper is safe and calm in heaven now," said Caroline.
"Do you pity what he suffered on earth?" asked Miss Keeldar.
"Pity him, Shirley? What can I do else? He was nearly broken-hearted
when he wrote that poem, and it almost breaks one's heart to read it.
But he found relief in writing it--I know he did; and that gift of
poetry--the most divine bestowed on man--was, I believe, granted to
allay emotions when their strength threatens harm. It seems to me,
Shirley, that nobody should write poetry to exhibit intellect or
attainment. Who cares for that sort of poetry? Who cares for
learning--who cares for fine words in poetry? And who does not care for
feeling--real feeling--however simply, even rudely expressed?"
"It seems you care for it, at all events; and certainly, in hearing that
poem, one discovers that Cowper was under an impulse strong as that of
the wind which drove the ship--an impulse which, while it would not
suffer him to stop to add ornament to a single stanza, filled him with
force to achieve the whole with consummate perfection. You managed to
recite it with a steady voice, Caroline. I wonder thereat."
"Cowper's hand did not tremble in writing the lines. Why should my voice
falter in repeating them? Depend on it, Shirley, no tear blistered the
manuscript of 'The Castaway.' I hear in it no sob of sorrow, only the
cry of despair; but, that cry uttered, I believe the deadly spasm passed
from his heart, that he wept abundantly, and was comforted."
Shirley resumed her ballad minstrelsy. Stopping short, she remarked ere
long, "One could have loved Cowper, if it were only for the sake of
having the privilege of comforting him."
"You never would have loved Cowper," rejoined Caroline promptly. "He was
not made to be loved by woman."
"What do you mean?"
"What I say. I know there is a kind of natures in the world--and very
noble, elevated natures too--whom love never comes near. You might have
sought Cowper with the intention of loving him, and you would have
looked at him, pitied him, and left him, forced away by a sense of the
impossible, the incongruous, as the crew were borne from their drowning
comrade by 'the furious blast.'"
"You may be right. Who told you this?"
"And what I say of Cowper, I should say of Rousseau. Was Rousseau ever
loved? He loved passionately; but was his passion ever returned? I am
certain, never. And if there were any female Cowpers and Rousseaus, I
should assert the same of them."
"Who told you this, I ask? Did Moore?"
"Why should anybody have told me? Have I not an instinct? Can I not
divine by analogy? Moore never talked to me either about Cowper, or
Rousseau, or love. The voice we hear in solitude told me all I know on
these subjects."
"Do you like characters of the Rousseau order, Caroline?"
"Not at all, as a whole. I sympathize intensely with certain qualities
they possess. Certain divine sparks in their nature dazzle my eyes, and
make my soul glow. Then, again, I scorn them. They are made of clay and
gold. The refuse and the ore make a mass of weakness: taken altogether,
I feel them unnatural, unhealthy, repulsive."
"I dare say I should be more tolerant of a Rousseau than you would,
Cary. Submissive and contemplative yourself, you like the stern and the
practical. By the way, you must miss that Cousin Robert of yours very
much, now that you and he never meet."
"I do."
"And he must miss you?"
"That he does not."
"I cannot imagine," pursued Shirley, who had lately got a habit of
introducing Moore's name into the conversation, even when it seemed to
have no business there--"I cannot imagine but that he was fond of you,
since he took so much notice of you, talked to you, and taught you so
much."
"He never was fond of me; he never professed to be fond of me. He took
pains to prove that he only just tolerated me."
Caroline, determined not to err on the flattering side in estimating her
cousin's regard for her, always now habitually thought of it and
mentioned it in the most scanty measure. She had her own reasons for
being less sanguine than ever in hopeful views of the future, less
indulgent to pleasurable retrospections of the past.
"Of course, then," observed Miss Keeldar, "you only just tolerated him
in return?"
"Shirley, men and women are so different; they are in such a different