by George Eliot
‘Only for your own sake, my fairy,’ said Mrs Transome, smiling faintly, and putting her hand under Esther’s chin. ‘Doesn’t it make you shudder to look at me?’
‘Why will you say such naughty things?’ said Esther, affectionately. ‘If you had had a daughter, she would have desired to be with you most when you most wanted cheering. And surely every young woman has something of a daughter’s feeling towards an older one who has been kind to her.’
‘I should like you to be really my daughter,’ said Mrs Transome, rousing herself to look a little brighter. ‘That is something still for an old woman to hope for.’
Esther blushed: she had not foreseen this application of words that came from pitying tenderness. To divert the train of thought as quickly as possible, she at once asked what she had previously had in her mind to ask. Before her blush had disappeared she said,
‘O, you are so good; I shall ask you to indulge me very much. It is to let us set out very early to Loamford on Wednesday, and put me down at a particular house, that I may keep an engagement with my father. It is a private matter, that I wish no one to know about, if possible. And he will bring me back to you wherever you appoint.’
In that way Esther won her end without needing to betray it; and as Harold was already away at Loamford, she was the more secure.
The Independent minister’s house at which she was set down, and where she was received by her father, was in a quiet street not far from the gaol. Esther had thrown a dark cloak over the handsomer coverings which Denner had assured her was absolutely required of ladies who sat anywhere near the judge at a great trial; and as the bonnet of that day did not throw the face into high relief, but rather into perspective, a veil drawn down gave her a sufficiently inconspicuous appearance.
‘I have arranged all things, my dear,’ said Mr Lyon, ‘and Felix expects us. We will lose no time.’
They walked away at once, Esther not asking a question. She had no consciousness of the road along which they passed; she could never remember anything but a dim sense of entering within high walls and going along passages, till they were ushered into a larger space than she expected, and her father said, –
‘It is here that we are permitted to see Felix, my Esther. He will presently appear.’
Esther automatically took off her gloves and bonnet, as if she had entered the house after a walk. She had lost the complete consciousness of everything except that she was going to see Felix. She trembled. It seemed to her as if he too would look altered after her new life – as if even the past would change for her and be no longer a steadfast remembrance, but something she had been mistaken about, as she had been about the new life. Perhaps she was growing out of that childhood to which common things have rareness, and all objects look larger. Perhaps from henceforth the whole world was to be meaner for her. The dread concentrated in those moments seemed worse than anything she had known before. It was what the dread of a pilgrim might be who has it whispered to him that the holy places are a delusion, or that he will see them with a soul unstirred and unbelieving. Every minute that passes may be charged with some such crisis in the little inner world of man or woman.
But soon the door opened slightly; some one looked in; then it opened wide, and Felix Holt entered.
‘Miss Lyon – Esther!’ and her hand was in his grasp.
He was just the same – no, something inexpressibly better, because of the distance and separation, and the half-weary novelties, which made him like the return of morning.
‘Take no heed of me, children,’ said Mr Lyon. ‘I have some notes to make, and my time is precious. We may remain here only a quarter of an hour.’ And the old man sat down at a window with his back to them, writing with his head bent close to the paper.
‘You are very pale; you look ill, compared with your old self,’ said Esther. She had taken her hand away, but they stood still near each other, she looking up at him.
‘The fact is, I’m not fond of prison,’ said Felix, smiling; ‘but I suppose the best I can hope for is to have a good deal more of it.’
‘It is thought that in the worst case a pardon may be obtained,’ said Esther, avoiding Harold Transome’s name.
‘I don’t rely on that,’ said Felix, shaking his head. ‘My wisest course is to make up my mind to the very ugliest penalty they can condemn me to. If I can face that, anything less will seem easy. But you know,’ he went on, smiling at her brightly, ‘I never went in for fine company and cushions. I can’t be very heavily disappointed in that way.’
‘Do you see things just as you used to do?’ said Esther, turning pale as she said it – ‘I mean – about poverty, and the people you will live among. Has all the misunderstanding and sadness left you just as obstinate?’ She tried to smile, but could not succeed.
‘What – about the sort of life I should lead if I were free again?’ said Felix.
‘Yes. I can’t help being discouraged for you by all these things that have happened. See how you may fail!’ Esther spoke timidly. She saw a peculiar smile, which she knew well, gathering in his eyes. ‘Ah, I daresay I am silly,’ she said, deprecatingly.
‘No, you are dreadfully inspired,’ said Felix. ‘When the wicked Tempter is tired of snarling that word failure in a man’s cell, he sends a voice like a thrush to say it for him. See now what a messenger of darkness you are!’ He smiled, and took her two hands between his, pressed together as children hold them up in prayer. Both of them felt too solemnly to be bashful. They looked straight into each other’s eyes, as angels do when they tell some truth. And they stood in that way while he went on speaking.
‘But I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. As to just the amount of result he may see from his particular work – that’s a tremendous uncertainty: the universe has not been arranged for the gratification of his feelings. As long as a man sees and believes in some great good, he’ll prefer working towards that in the way he’s best fit for, come what may. I put effects at their minimum, but I’d rather have the minimum of effect, if it’s of the sort I care for, than the maximum of effect I don’t care for – a lot of fine things that are not to my taste – and if they were, the conditions of holding them while the world is what it is, are such as would jar on me like grating metal.’
‘Yes,’ said Esther, in a low tone, ‘I think I understand that now, better than I used to do.’ The words of Felix at last seemed strangely to fit her own experience. But she said no more, though he seemed to wait for it a moment or two, looking at her. But then he went on –
‘I don’t mean to be illustrious, you know, and make a new era, else it would be kind of you to get a raven and teach it to croak “failure” in my ears. Where great things can’t happen, I care for very small things, such as will never be known beyond a few garrets and workshops. And then, as to one thing I believe in, I don’t think I can altogether fail. If there’s anything our people want convincing of, it is, that there’s some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station. That’s one of the beliefs I choose to consecrate my life to. If anybody could demonstrate to me that I was a flat for it, I shouldn’t think it would follow that I must borrow money to set up genteelly and order new clothes. That’s not a rigorous consequence to my understanding.’
They smiled at each other, with the old sense of amusement they had so often had together.
‘You are just the same,’ said Esther.
‘And you?’ said Felix. ‘My affairs have been settled long ago. But yours – a great change has come in them – magic at work.’
‘Yes,’ said Esther, rather falteringly.
‘Well,’ said Felix, looking at her gravely again, ‘it’s a case of fitness that seems to give a chance sanction to that musty law. The first time I saw you, your birth was an immense puzzle to me. However, the appropriate conditions are come at last.’
These words seemed
cruel to Esther. But Felix could not know all the reasons for their seeming so. She could not speak; she was turning cold and feeling her heart beat painfully.
‘All your tastes are gratified now,’ he went on innocently. ‘But you’ll remember the old pedagogue and his lectures?’
One thought in the mind of Felix was, that Esther was sure to marry Harold Transome. Men readily believe these things of the women who love them. But he could not allude to the marriage more directly. He was afraid of this destiny for her, without having any very distinct knowledge by which to justify his fear to the mind of another. It did not satisfy him that Esther should marry Harold Transome.
‘My children,’ said Mr Lyon at this moment, not looking round, but only looking close at his watch, ‘we have just two minutes more.’ Then he went on writing.
Esther did not speak, but Felix could not help observing now that her hands had turned to a deathly coldness, and that she was trembling. He believed, he knew, that whatever prospects she had, this feeling was for his sake. An overpowering impulse from mingled love, gratitude, and anxiety, urged him to say –
‘I had a horrible struggle, Esther. But you see I was right. There was a fitting lot in reserve for you. But remember you have cost a great price – don’t throw what is precious away. I shall want the news that you have a happiness worthy of you.’
Esther felt too miserable for tears to come. She looked helplessly at Felix for a moment, then took her hands from his, and, turning away mutely, walked dreamily towards her father, and said, ‘Father, I am ready – there is no more to say.’
She turned back again, towards the chair where her bonnet lay, with a face quite corpse-like above her dark garment.
‘Esther!’
She heard Felix say the word, with an entreating cry, and went towards him with the swift movement of a frightened child towards its protector. He clasped her, and they kissed each other.
She never could recall anything else that happened, till she was in the carriage again with Mrs Transome.
CHAPTER XLVI
Why, there are maidens of heroic touch,
And yet they seem like things of gossamer
You’d pinch the life out of, as out of moths.
O, it is not loud tones and mouthingness,
’Tis not the arms akimbo and large strides,
That make a woman’s force. The tiniest birds,
With softest downy breasts, have passions in them
And are brave with love.
Esther was so placed in the Court, under Mrs Transome’s wing, as to see and hear everything without effort. Harold had received them at the hotel, and had observed that Esther looked ill, and was unusually abstracted in her manner, but this seemed to be sufficiently accounted for by her sympathetic anxiety about the result of a trial in which the prisoner at the bar was a friend, and in which both her father and himself were important witnesses. Mrs Transome had no reluctance to keep a small secret from her son, and no betrayal was made of that previous ‘engagement’ of Esther’s with her father. Harold was particularly delicate and unobtrusive in his attentions to-day: he had the consciousness that he was going to behave in a way that would gratify Esther and win her admiration, and we are all of us made more graceful by the inward presence of what we believe to be a generous purpose; our actions move to a hidden music – ‘a melody that’s sweetly pitched in tune’.1
If Esther had been less absorbed by supreme feelings, she would have been aware that she was an object of special notice. In the bare squareness of a public hall, where there was not one jutting angle to hang a guess or a thought upon, not an image or a bit of colour to stir the fancy, and where the only objects of speculation, of admiration, or of any interest whatever, were human beings, and especially the human beings that occupied positions indicating some importance, the notice bestowed on Esther would not have been surprising, even if it had been merely a tribute to her youthful charm, which was well companioned by Mrs Transome’s elderly majesty. But it was due also to whisperings that she was an hereditary claimant of the Transome estates, whom Harold Transome was about to marry. Harold himself had of late not cared to conceal either the fact or the probability: they both tended rather to his honour than his dishonour. And to-day, when there was a good proportion of Trebians present, the whisperings spread rapidly.
The Court was still more crowded than on the previous day, when our poor acquaintance Dredge and his two collier companions were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment with hard labour, and the more enlightened prisoner, who stole the Debarrys’ plate, to transportation for life. Poor Dredge had cried, had wished he’d ‘never heared of a ’lection’, and in spite of sermons from the gaol chaplain, fell back on the explanation that this was a world in which Spratt and Old Nick were sure to get the best of it; so that in Dredge’s case, at least, most observers must have had the melancholy conviction that there had been no enhancement of public spirit and faith in progress from that wave of political agitation which had reached the Sproxton Pits.
But curiosity was necessarily at a higher pitch to-day, when the character of the prisoner and the circumstances of his offence were of a highly unusual kind. As soon as Felix appeared at the bar, a murmur rose and spread into a loud buzz, which continued until there had been repeated authoritative calls for silence in the Court. Rather singularly, it was now for the first time that Esther had a feeling of pride in him on the ground simply of his appearance. At this moment, when he was the centre of a multitudinous gaze, which seemed to act on her own vision like a broad unmitigated daylight, she felt that there was something pre-eminent in him, notwithstanding the vicinity of numerous gentlemen. No apple-woman would have admired him; not only to feminine minds like Mrs Tiliot’s, but to many minds in coat and waistcoat, there was something dangerous and perhaps unprincipled in his bare throat and great Gothic head; and his somewhat massive person would doubtless have come out very oddly from the hands of a fashionable tailor of that time. But as Esther saw his large grey eyes looking round calmly and undefiantly, first at the audience generally, and then with a more observant expression at the lawyers and other persons immediately around him, she felt that he bore the outward stamp of a distinguished nature. Forgive her if she needed this satisfaction: all of us – whether men or women – are liable to this weakness of liking to have our preference justified before others as well as ourselves. Esther said inwardly, with a certain triumph, that Felix Holt looked as worthy to be chosen in the midst of this large assembly, as he had ever looked in their tête-à-tête under the sombre light of the little parlour in Malthouse Yard.
Esther had felt some relief in hearing from her father that Felix had insisted on doing without his mother’s presence; and since to Mrs Holt’s imagination, notwithstanding her general desire to have her character inquired into, there was no greatly consolatory difference between being a witness and a criminal, and an appearance of any kind ‘before the judge’ could hardly be made to suggest anything definite that would overcome the dim sense of unalleviated disgrace, she had been less inclined than usual to complain of her son’s decision. Esther had shuddered beforehand at the inevitable farce there would be in Mrs Holt’s testimony. But surely Felix would lose something for want of a witness who could testify to his behaviour in the morning before he became involved in the tumult?
‘He is really a fine young fellow,’ said Harold, coming to speak to Esther after a colloquy with the prisoner’s solicitor. ‘I hope he will not make a blunder in defending himself.’
‘He is not likely to make a blunder,’ said Esther. She had recovered her colour a little, and was brighter than she had been all the morning before.
Felix had seemed to include her in his general glance, but had avoided looking at her particularly. She understood how delicate feeling for her would prevent this, and that she might safely look at him, and towards her father, whom she could see in the same direction. Turning to Harold to make an observation, she saw that he was looki
ng towards the same point, but with an expression on his face that surprised her.
‘Dear me,’ she said, prompted to speak without any reflection; ‘how angry you look! I never saw you look so angry before. It is not my father you are looking at?’
‘Oh no! I am angry at something I’m looking away from,’ said Harold, making an effort to drive back the troublesome demon who would stare out at window. ‘It’s that Jermyn,’ he added, glancing at his mother as well as Esther. ‘He will thrust himself under my eyes everywhere since I refused him an interview and returned his letter. I’m determined never to speak to him directly again, if I can help it.’
Mrs Transome heard with a changeless face. She had for some time been watching, and had taken on her marble look of immobility. She said an inward bitter ‘Of course!’ to everything that was unpleasant.
After this Esther soon became impatient of all speech: her attention was riveted on the proceedings of the Court, and on the mode in which Felix bore himself. In the case for the prosecution there was nothing more than a reproduction, with irrelevancies added by witnesses, of the facts already known to us. Spratt had retained consciousness enough, in the midst of his terror, to swear that, when he was tied to the finger-post, Felix was presiding over the actions of the mob. The landlady of the Seven Stars, who was indebted to Felix for rescue from pursuit by some drunken rioters, gave evidence that went to prove his assumption of leadership prior to the assault on Spratt, – remembering only that he had called away her pursuers to ‘better sport’. Various respectable witnesses swore to Felix’s ‘encouragement’ of the rioters who were dragging Spratt in King Street; to his fatal assault on Tucker; and to his attitude in front of the drawing-room window at the Manor.
Three other witnesses gave evidence of expressions used by the prisoner, tending to show the character of the acts with which he was charged. Two were Treby tradesmen, the third was a clerk from Duffield. The clerk had heard Felix speak at Duffield; the Treby men had frequently heard him declare himself on public matters; and they all quoted expressions which tended to show that he had a virulent feeling against the respectable shop-keeping class, and that nothing was likely to be more congenial to him than the gutting of retailers’ shops. No one else knew – the witnesses themselves did not know fully – how far their strong perception and memory on these points was due to a fourth mind, namely, that of Mr John Johnson, the attorney, who was nearly related to one of the Treby witnesses, and a familiar acquaintance of the Duffield clerk. Man cannot be defined as an evidence-giving animal; and in the difficulty of getting up evidence on any subject, there is room for much unrecognized action of diligent persons who have the extra stimulus of some private motive. Mr Johnson was present in court to-day, but in a modest, retired situation. He had come down to give information to Mr Jermyn, and to gather information in other quarters, which was well illuminated by the appearance of Esther in company with the Transomes.
