Shirley
"You never plotted to win a husband, I'll be bound," pursued Mrs. Yorke;
"and you have not the benefit of previous experience to aid you in
discovering when others plot."
Caroline felt this kind language where the benevolent speaker intended
she should feel it--in her very heart. She could not even parry the
shafts; she was defenceless for the present. To answer would have been
to avow that the cap fitted. Mrs. Yorke, looking at her as she sat with
troubled, downcast eyes, and cheek burning painfully, and figure
expressing in its bent attitude and unconscious tremor all the
humiliation and chagrin she experienced, felt the sufferer was fair
game. The strange woman had a natural antipathy to a shrinking,
sensitive character--a nervous temperament; nor was a pretty, delicate,
and youthful face a passport to her affections. It was seldom she met
with all these obnoxious qualities combined in one individual; still
more seldom she found that individual at her mercy, under circumstances
in which she could crush her well. She happened this afternoon to be
specially bilious and morose--as much disposed to gore as any vicious
"mother of the herd." Lowering her large head she made a new charge.
"Your cousin Hortense is an excellent sister, Miss Helstone. Such ladies
as come to try their life's luck here at Hollow's Cottage may, by a very
little clever female artifice, cajole the mistress of the house, and
have the game all in their own hands. You are fond of your cousin's
society, I dare say, miss?"
"Of which cousin's?"
"Oh, of the lady's, _of course_."
"Hortense is, and always has been, most kind to me."
"Every sister with an eligible single brother is considered most kind by
her spinster friends."
"Mrs. Yorke," said Caroline, lifting her eyes slowly, their blue orbs at
the same time clearing from trouble, and shining steady and full, while
the glow of shame left her cheek, and its hue turned pale and
settled--"Mrs. Yorke, may I ask what you mean?"
"To give you a lesson on the cultivation of rectitude, to disgust you
with craft and false sentiment."
"Do I need this lesson?"
"Most young ladies of the present day need it. You are quite a modern
young lady--morbid, delicate, professing to like retirement; which
implies, I suppose, that you find little worthy of your sympathies in
the ordinary world. The ordinary world--every-day honest folks--are
better than you think them, much better than any bookish, romancing chit
of a girl can be who hardly ever puts her nose over her uncle the
parson's garden wall."
"Consequently of whom you know nothing. Excuse me--indeed, it does not
matter whether you excuse me or not--you have attacked me without
provocation; I shall defend myself without apology. Of my relations with
my two cousins you are ignorant. In a fit of ill-humour you have
attempted to poison them by gratuitous insinuations, which are far more
crafty and false than anything with which you can justly charge me. That
I happen to be pale, and sometimes to look diffident, is no business of
yours; that I am fond of books, and indisposed for common gossip, is
still less your business; that I am a 'romancing chit of a girl' is a
mere conjecture on your part. I never romanced to you nor to anybody you
know. That I am the parson's niece is not a crime, though you may be
narrow-minded enough to think it so. You dislike me. You have no just
reason for disliking me; therefore keep the expression of your aversion
to yourself. If at any time in future you evince it annoyingly, I shall
answer even less scrupulously than I have done now."
She ceased, and sat in white and still excitement. She had spoken in the
clearest of tones, neither fast nor loud; but her silver accents
thrilled the ear. The speed of the current in her veins was just then as
swift as it was viewless.
Mrs. Yorke was not irritated at the reproof, worded with a severity so
simple, dictated by a pride so quiet. Turning coolly to Miss Moore, she
said, nodding her cap approvingly, "She has spirit in her, after
all.--Always speak as honestly as you have done just now," she
continued, "and you'll do."
"I repel a recommendation so offensive," was the answer, delivered in
the same pure key, with the same clear look. "I reject counsel poisoned
by insinuation. It is my right to speak as I think proper; nothing binds
me to converse as you dictate. So far from always speaking as I have
done just now, I shall never address any one in a tone so stern or in
language so harsh, unless in answer to unprovoked insult."
"Mother, you have found your match," pronounced little Jessie, whom the
scene appeared greatly to edify. Rose had heard the whole with an
unmoved face. She now said, "No; Miss Helstone is not my mother's match,
for she allows herself to be vexed. My mother would wear her out in a
few weeks. Shirley Keeldar manages better.--Mother, you have never hurt
Miss Keeldar's feelings yet. She wears armour under her silk dress that
you cannot penetrate."
Mrs. Yorke often complained that her children were mutinous. It was
strange that with all her strictness, with all her "strong-mindedness,"
she could gain no command over them. A look from their father had more
influence with them than a lecture from her.
Miss Moore--to whom the position of witness to an altercation in which
she took no part was highly displeasing, as being an unimportant
secondary post--now rallying her dignity, prepared to utter a discourse
which was to prove both parties in the wrong, and to make it clear to
each disputant that she had reason to be ashamed of herself, and ought
to submit humbly to the superior sense of the individual then addressing
her. Fortunately for her audience, she had not harangued above ten
minutes when Sarah's entrance with the tea-tray called her attention,
first to the fact of that damsel having a gilt comb in her hair and a
red necklace round her throat, and secondly, and subsequently to a
pointed remonstrance, to the duty of making tea. After the meal Rose
restored her to good-humour by bringing her guitar and asking for a
song, and afterwards engaging her in an intelligent and sharp
cross-examination about guitar-playing and music in general.
Jessie, meantime, directed her assiduities to Caroline. Sitting on a
stool at her feet, she talked to her, first about religion and then
about politics. Jessie was accustomed at home to drink in a great deal
of what her father said on these subjects, and afterwards in company to
retail, with more wit and fluency than consistency or discretion, his
opinions, antipathies, and preferences. She rated Caroline soundly for
being a member of the Established Church, and for having an uncle a
clergyman. She informed her that she lived on the country, and ought to
work for her living honestly, instead of passing a useless life, and
eating the bread of idleness in the shape of tithes. Thence Jessie
passed to a review of the ministry at that time in office, and a
consideration of its deserts. She made familiar mention of the names of
Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Perceval. Each of these personages she adorned
with a character that might have separately suited Moloch and Belial.
She denounced the war as wholesale murder, and Lord Wellington as a
"hired butcher."
Her auditress listened with exceeding edification. Jessie had something
of the genius of humour in her nature. It was inexpressibly comic to
hear her repeating her sire's denunciations in his nervous northern
Doric; as hearty a little Jacobin as ever pent a free mutinous spirit in
a muslin frock and sash. Not malignant by nature, her language was not
so bitter as it was racy, and the expressive little face gave a piquancy
to every phrase which held a beholder's interest captive.
Caroline chid her when she abused Lord Wellington; but she listened
delighted to a subsequent tirade against the Prince Regent. Jessie
quickly read, in the sparkle of her hearer's eye and the laughter
hovering round her lips, that at last she had hit on a topic that
pleased. Many a time had she heard the fat "Adonis of fifty" discussed
at her father's breakfast-table, and she now gave Mr. Yorke's comments
on the theme--genuine as uttered by his Yorkshire lips.
But, Jessie, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening,
wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky, but it curtains it
from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest; it hurries sobbing over hills
of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all
day on that church tower. It rises dark from the stony enclosure of its
graveyard. The nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet.
This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years
ago--a howling, rainy autumn evening too--when certain who had that day
performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery sat
near a wood fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry
and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been
made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence
could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived; and they knew
that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered
their lost darling, and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above
her buried head. The fire warmed them; life and friendship yet blessed
them; but Jessie lay cold, coffined, solitary--only the sod screening
her from the storm.
* * * * *
Mrs. Yorke folded up her knitting, cut short the music lesson and the
lecture on politics, and concluded her visit to the cottage, at an hour
early enough to ensure her return to Briarmains before the blush of
sunset should quite have faded in heaven, or the path up the fields have
become thoroughly moist with evening dew.
The lady and her daughters being gone, Caroline felt that she also ought
to resume her scarf, kiss her cousin's cheek, and trip away homeward. If
she lingered much later dusk would draw on, and Fanny would be put to
the trouble of coming to fetch her. It was both baking and ironing day
at the rectory, she remembered--Fanny would be busy. Still, she could
not quit her seat at the little parlour window. From no point of view
could the west look so lovely as from that lattice with the garland of
jessamine round it, whose white stars and green leaves seemed now but
gray pencil outlines--graceful in form, but colourless in tint--against
the gold incarnadined of a summer evening--against the fire-tinged blue
of an August sky at eight o'clock p.m.
Caroline looked at the wicket-gate, beside which holly-oaks spired up
tall. She looked at the close hedge of privet and laurel fencing in the
garden; her eyes longed to see something more than the shrubs before
they turned from that limited prospect. They longed to see a human
figure, of a certain mould and height, pass the hedge and enter the
gate. A human figure she at last saw--nay, two. Frederick Murgatroyd
went by, carrying a pail of water; Joe Scott followed, dangling on his
forefinger the keys of the mill. They were going to lock up mill and
stables for the night, and then betake themselves home.
"So must I," thought Caroline, as she half rose and sighed.
"This is all folly--heart-breaking folly," she added. "In the first
place, though I should stay till dark there will be no arrival; because
I feel in my heart, Fate has written it down in to-day's page of her
eternal book, that I am not to have the pleasure I long for. In the
second place, if he stepped in this moment, my presence here would be a
chagrin to him, and the consciousness that it must be so would turn half
my blood to ice. His hand would, perhaps, be loose and chill if I put
mine into it; his eye would be clouded if I sought its beam. I should