Shirley
seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take
a peep from a particular window at a particular view, whence Briarfield
church and rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has
scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric or square of
half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are
heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him. It is a
hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and
see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the
open kitchen door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled
with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked
Guinea-fowls, and a bright variety of pure white, and purple-necked, and
blue and cinnamon plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She
runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the door step
scattering crumbs. Around her throng her eager, plump, happy feathered
vassals. John is about the stables, and John must be talked to, and her
mare looked at. She is still petting and patting it when the cows come
in to be milked. This is important; Shirley must stay and take a review
of them all. There are perhaps some little calves, some little
new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them.
Miss Keeldar must be introduced to them by John, must permit herself the
treat of feeding them with her own hand, under the direction of her
careful foreman. Meantime John moots doubtful questions about the
farming of certain "crofts," and "ings," and "holmes," and his mistress
is necessitated to fetch her garden-hat--a gipsy straw--and accompany
him, over stile and along hedgerow, to hear the conclusion of the whole
agricultural matter on the spot, and with the said "crofts," "ings," and
"holms" under her eye. Bright afternoon thus wears into soft evening,
and she comes home to a late tea, and after tea she never sews.
After tea Shirley reads, and she is just about as tenacious of her book
as she is lax of her needle. Her study is the rug, her seat a footstool,
or perhaps only the carpet at Mrs. Pryor's feet: there she always
learned her lessons when a child, and old habits have a strong power
over her. The tawny and lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched beside
her, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws--straight, strong, and
shapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistress
generally reposes on the loving serf's rude head, because if she takes
it away he groans and is discontented. Shirley's mind is given to her
book. She lifts not her eyes; she neither stirs nor speaks--unless,
indeed, it be to return a brief respectful answer to Mrs. Pryor, who
addresses deprecatory phrases to her now and then.
"My dear, you had better not have that great dog so near you; he is
crushing the border of your dress."
"Oh, it is only muslin. I can put a clean one on to-morrow."
"My dear, I wish you could acquire the habit of sitting to a table when
you read."
"I will try, ma'am, some time; but it is so comfortable to do as one has
always been accustomed to do."
"My dear, let me beg of you to put that book down. You are trying your
eyes by the doubtful firelight."
"No, ma'am, not at all; my eyes are never tired."
At last, however, a pale light falls on the page from the window. She
looks; the moon is up. She closes the volume, rises, and walks through
the room. Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed,
refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her
mind with pictures. The still parlour, the clean hearth, the window
opening on the twilight sky, and showing its "sweet regent," new throned
and glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. A
still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled,
untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no
human agency bestowed--the pure gift of God to His creature, the free
dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a
genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and
light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels
looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul
possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes
it; she has not time to wish. The swift glory spreads out, sweeping and
kindling, and multiplies its splendours faster than Thought can effect
his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. Shirley
says nothing while the trance is upon her--she is quite mute; but if
Mrs. Pryor speaks to her now, she goes out quietly, and continues her
walk upstairs in the dim gallery.
If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she
would take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection of
such moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would seize, she would fix
the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the
organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of
property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and
write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the
story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and
thus possess what she was enabled to create. But indolent she is,
reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams are
rare, her feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, and
will die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose bright
fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.
Shirley takes life easily. Is not that fact written in her eye? In her
good-tempered moments is it not as full of lazy softness as in her brief
fits of anger it is fulgent with quick-flashing fire? Her nature is in
her eye. So long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, and
tenderness possess that large gray sphere; incense her, a red ray
pierces the dew, it quickens instantly to flame.
Ere the month of July was past, Miss Keeldar would probably have started
with Caroline on that northern tour they had planned; but just at that
epoch an invasion befell Fieldhead. A genteel foraging party besieged
Shirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. An
uncle, an aunt, and two cousins from the south--a Mr., Mrs., and two
Misses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ----shire--came down upon her in
state. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she did
with a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to be
prompt in action and fertile in expedient where a victory was to be
gained for her will. Miss Helstone even asked her how it was she
submitted so readily. She answered, old feelings had their power; she
had passed two years of her early youth at Sympson Grove.
"How did she like her relatives?"
She had nothing in common with them, she replied. Little Harry Sympson,
indeed, the sole son of the family, was very unlike his sisters, and of
him she had formerly been fond; but he was not coming to Yorkshire--at
least not yet.
The next Sunday the Fieldhead pew in Briarfield Church appeared peopled
with a prim, trim, fidgety, elderly gentleman, who shifted his
spectacles, and changed his position every three minutes; a patient,
placid-looking elderly lady in brown satin; and two pattern young
ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment. Shirley had the air
of a black swan or a white crow in the midst of this party, and very
forlorn was her aspect. Having brought her into respectable society, we
will leave her there a while, and look after Miss Helstone.
Separated from Miss Keeldar for the present, as she could not seek her
in the midst of her fine relatives, scared away from Fieldhead by the
visiting commotion which the new arrivals occasioned in the
neighbourhood, Caroline was limited once more to the gray rectory, the
solitary morning walk in remote by-paths, the long, lonely afternoon
sitting in a quiet parlour which the sun forsook at noon, or in the
garden alcove where it shone bright, yet sad, on the ripening red
currants trained over the trellis, and on the fair monthly roses
entwined between, and through them fell chequered on Caroline sitting in
her white summer dress, still as a garden statue. There she read old
books, taken from her uncle's library. The Greek and Latin were of no
use to her, and its collection of light literature was chiefly contained
on a shelf which had belonged to her aunt Mary--some venerable Lady's
Magazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, and
undergone a storm, and whose pages were stained with salt water; some
mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of
preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; the
equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living;
a few old English classics. From these faded flowers Caroline had in her
childhood extracted the honey; they were tasteless to her now. By way of
change, and also of doing good, she would sew--make garments for the
poor, according to good Miss Ainley's direction. Sometimes, as she felt
and saw her tears fall slowly on her work, she would wonder how the
excellent woman who had cut it out and arranged it for her managed to be
so equably serene in _her_ solitude.
"I never find Miss Ainley oppressed with despondency or lost in grief,"
she thought; "yet her cottage is a still, dim little place, and she is
without a bright hope or near friend in the world. I remember, though,
she told me once she had tutored her thoughts to tend upwards to heaven.
She allowed there was, and ever had been, little enjoyment in this world
for her, and she looks, I suppose, to the bliss of the world to come. So
do nuns, with their close cell, their iron lamp, their robe strait as a
shroud, their bed narrow as a coffin. She says often she has no fear of
death--no dread of the grave; no more, doubtless, had St. Simeon
Stylites, lifted up terrible on his wild column in the wilderness; no
more has the Hindu votary stretched on his couch of iron spikes. Both
these having violated nature, their natural likings and antipathies are
reversed; they grow altogether morbid. I do fear death as yet, but I
believe it is because I am young. Poor Miss Ainley would cling closer to
life if life had more charms for her. God surely did not create us and
cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe
in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as we
retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless,
blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is
becoming to me among the rest.
"Nobody," she went on--"nobody in particular is to blame, that I can
see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much
I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel
there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have
more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than
they possess now. And when I speak thus I have no impression that I
displease God by my words; that I am either impious or impatient,
irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hears
many a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his ears
against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say _impotent_, for I
observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure it
usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only a
sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be
reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder,
in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful