Shirley
behind her cousins as they neared Fieldhead on their return. Perhaps an
interval of twenty minutes elapsed between her separation from them and
her re-entrance into the house. In the meantime she had spoken to John,
and then she had lingered in the lane at the gate. A summons to
luncheon called her in. She excused herself from the meal, and went
upstairs.
"Is not Shirley coming to luncheon?" asked Isabella. "She said she was
hungry."
An hour after, as she did not quit her chamber, one of her cousins went
to seek her there. She was found sitting at the foot of the bed, her
head resting on her hand; she looked quite pale, very thoughtful, almost
sad.
"You are not ill?" was the question put.
"A little sick," replied Miss Keeldar.
Certainly she was not a little changed from what she had been two hours
before.
This change, accounted for only by those three words, explained no
otherwise; this change--whencesoever springing, effected in a brief ten
minutes--passed like no light summer cloud. She talked when she joined
her friends at dinner, talked as usual. She remained with them during
the evening. When again questioned respecting her health, she declared
herself perfectly recovered. It had been a mere passing faintness, a
momentary sensation, not worth a thought; yet it was felt there was a
difference in Shirley.
The next day--the day, the week, the fortnight after--this new and
peculiar shadow lingered on the countenance, in the manner of Miss
Keeldar. A strange quietude settled over her look, her movements, her
very voice. The alteration was not so marked as to court or permit
frequent questioning, yet it _was_ there, and it would not pass away. It
hung over her like a cloud which no breeze could stir or disperse. Soon
it became evident that to notice this change was to annoy her. First she
shrank from remark; and, if persisted in, she, with her own peculiar
_hauteur_, repelled it. "Was she ill?" The reply came with decision.
"I _am not_."
"Did anything weigh on her mind? Had anything happened to affect her
spirits?"
She scornfully ridiculed the idea. "What did they mean by spirits? She
had no spirits, black or white, blue or gray, to affect."
"Something must be the matter--she was so altered."
"She supposed she had a right to alter at her ease. She knew she was
plainer. If it suited her to grow ugly, why need others fret themselves
on the subject?"
"There must be a cause for the change. What was it?"
She peremptorily requested to be let alone.
Then she would make every effort to appear quite gay, and she seemed
indignant at herself that she could not perfectly succeed. Brief
self-spurning epithets burst from her lips when alone. "Fool! coward!"
she would term herself. "Poltroon!" she would say, "if you must tremble,
tremble in secret! Quail where no eye sees you!"
"How dare you," she would ask herself--"how dare you show your weakness
and betray your imbecile anxieties? Shake them off; rise above them. If
you cannot do this, hide them."
And to hide them she did her best. She once more became resolutely
lively in company. When weary of effort and forced to relax, she sought
solitude--not the solitude of her chamber (she refused to mope, shut up
between four walls), but that wilder solitude which lies out of doors,
and which she could chase, mounted on Zoë, her mare. She took long rides
of half a day. Her uncle disapproved, but he dared not remonstrate. It
was never pleasant to face Shirley's anger, even when she was healthy
and gay; but now that her face showed thin, and her large eye looked
hollow, there was something in the darkening of that face and kindling
of that eye which touched as well as alarmed.
To all comparative strangers who, unconscious of the alterations in her
spirits, commented on the alteration in her looks, she had one reply,--
"I am perfectly well; I have not an ailment."
And health, indeed, she must have had, to be able to bear the exposure
to the weather she now encountered. Wet or fair, calm or storm, she took
her daily ride over Stilbro' Moor, Tartar keeping up at her side, with
his wolf-like gallop, long and untiring.
Twice, three times, the eyes of gossips--those eyes which are
everywhere, in the closet and on the hill-top--noticed that instead of
turning on Rushedge, the top ridge of Stilbro' Moor, she rode forwards
all the way to the town. Scouts were not wanting to mark her destination
there. It was ascertained that she alighted at the door of one Mr.
Pearson Hall, a solicitor, related to the vicar of Nunnely. This
gentleman and his ancestors had been the agents of the Keeldar family
for generations back. Some people affirmed that Miss Keeldar was become
involved in business speculations connected with Hollow's Mill--that she
had lost money, and was constrained to mortgage her land. Others
conjectured that she was going to be married, and that the settlements
were preparing.
* * * * *
Mr. Moore and Henry Sympson were together in the schoolroom. The tutor
was waiting for a lesson which the pupil seemed busy in preparing.
"Henry, make haste. The afternoon is getting on."
"Is it, sir?"
"Certainly. Are you nearly ready with that lesson?"
"No."
"Not _nearly_ ready?"
"I have not construed a line."
Mr. Moore looked up. The boy's tone was rather peculiar.
"The task presents no difficulties, Henry; or, if it does, bring them to
me. We will work together."
"Mr. Moore, I can do no work."
"My boy, you are ill."
"Sir, I am not worse in bodily health than usual, but my heart is full."
"Shut the book. Come hither, Harry. Come to the fireside."
Harry limped forward. His tutor placed him in a chair; his lips were
quivering, his eyes brimming. He laid his crutch on the floor, bent down
his head, and wept.
"This distress is not occasioned by physical pain, you say, Harry? You
have a grief; tell it me."
"Sir, I have such a grief as I never had before. I wish it could be
relieved in some way; I can hardly bear it."
"Who knows but, if we talk it over, we may relieve it? What is the
cause? Whom does it concern?"
"The cause, sir, is Shirley; it concerns Shirley."
"Does it? You think her changed?"
"All who know her think her changed--you too, Mr. Moore."
"Not seriously--no. I see no alteration but such as a favourable turn
might repair in a few weeks; besides, her own word must go for
something: she says she is well."
"There it is, sir. As long as she maintained she was well, I believed
her. When I was sad out of her sight, I soon recovered spirits in her
presence. Now----"
"Well, Harry, now. Has she said anything to you? You and she were
together in the garden two hours this morning. I saw her talking, and
you listening. Now, my dear Harry, if Miss Keeldar has said she is ill,
and enjoined you to keep her secret, do not obey her. For her life's
sake, avow everything. Speak, my boy."
"_She_ say she is ill! I believe, sir, if she were dying, she would
smile, and aver, 'Nothing ails me.'"
"What have you learned then? What new circumstance?"
"I have learned that she has just made her will."
"Made her will?"
The tutor and pupil were silent.
"She told you that?" asked Moore, when some minutes had elapsed.
"She told me quite cheerfully, not as an ominous circumstance, which I
felt it to be. She said I was the only person besides her solicitor,
Pearson Hall, and Mr. Helstone and Mr. Yorke, who knew anything about
it; and to me, she intimated, she wished specially to explain its
provisions."
"Go on, Harry."
"'Because,' she said, looking down on me with her beautiful eyes--oh!
they _are_ beautiful, Mr. Moore! I love them! I love her! She is my
star! Heaven must not claim her! She is lovely in this world, and fitted
for this world. Shirley is not an angel; she is a woman, and she shall
live with men. Seraphs shall not have her! Mr. Moore, if one of the
'sons of God,' with wings wide and bright as the sky, blue and sounding
as the sea, having seen that she was fair, descended to claim her, his
claim should be withstood--withstood by me--boy and cripple as I am."
"Henry Sympson, go on, when I tell you."
"'Because,' she said, 'if I made no will, and died before you, Harry,
all my property would go to you; and I do not intend that it should be
so, though your father would like it. But you,' she said, 'will have his
whole estate, which is large--larger than Fieldhead. Your sisters will
have nothing; so I have left them some money, though I do not love them,
both together, half so much as I love one lock of your fair hair.' She
said these words, and she called me her 'darling,' and let me kiss her.
She went on to tell me that she had left Caroline Helstone some money
too; that this manor house, with its furniture and books, she had
bequeathed to me, as she did not choose to take the old family place
from her own blood; and that all the rest of her property, amounting to
about twelve thousand pounds, exclusive of the legacies to my sisters
and Miss Helstone, she had willed, not to me, seeing I was already rich,
but to a good man, who would make the best use of it that any human
being could do--a man, she said, that was both gentle and brave, strong
and merciful--a man that might not profess to be pious, but she knew he
had the secret of religion pure and undefiled before God. The spirit of
love and peace was with him. He visited the fatherless and widows in
their affliction, and kept himself unspotted from the world. Then she
asked, 'Do you approve what I have done, Harry?' I could not answer. My
tears choked me, as they do now."
Mr. Moore allowed his pupil a moment to contend with and master his
emotion. He then demanded, "What else did she say?"
"When I had signified my full consent to the conditions of her will, she
told me I was a generous boy, and she was proud of me. 'And now,' she
added, 'in case anything should happen, you will know what to say to
Malice when she comes whispering hard things in your ear, insinuating
that Shirley has wronged you, that she did not love you. You will know
that I _did_ love you, Harry; that no sister could have loved you
better--my own treasure.' Mr. Moore, sir, when I remember her voice, and
recall her look, my heart beats as if it would break its strings. She
_may_ go to heaven before me--if God commands it, she _must_; but the
rest of my life--and my life will not be long, I am glad of that
now--shall be a straight, quick, thoughtful journey in the path her step
has pressed. I thought to enter the vault of the Keeldars before her.
Should it be otherwise, lay my coffin by Shirley's side."
Moore answered him with a weighty calm, that offered a strange contrast
to the boy's perturbed enthusiasm.
"You are wrong, both of you--you harm each other. If youth once falls
under the influence of a shadowy terror, it imagines there will never be
full sunlight again; its first calamity it fancies will last a lifetime.
What more did she say? Anything more?"
"We settled one or two family points between ourselves."
"I should rather like to know what----"
"But, Mr. Moore, you smile. _I_ could not smile to see Shirley in such a
mood."
"My boy, I am neither nervous, nor poetic, nor inexperienced. I see
things as they are; you don't as yet. Tell me these family points."
"Only, sir, she asked me whether I considered myself most of a Keeldar
or a Sympson; and I answered I was Keeldar to the core of the heart and
to the marrow of the bones. She said she was glad of it; for, besides
her, I was the only Keeldar left in England. And then we agreed on some
matters."
"Well?"
"Well, sir, that if I lived to inherit my father's estate, and her
house, I was to take the name of Keeldar, and to make Fieldhead my