Mrs. Morrison was going in with a leaflet; Lady Shuttleworth was going in with a pound of tea. From this place they could see Priscilla’s cottage, and Robin was nailing up its creepers in the sight of all Symford.
“Ah — I know what you mean,” said Mrs. Morrison quickly.
“It is always such a pity to see emotions wasted,” said Lady Shuttleworth slowly, as if weighing each word.
“Wasted? You do think she’s an adventuress, then?” said Mrs. Morrison eagerly.
“Sh-sh. My dear, how could I think anything so unkind? But we who are old” — Mrs. Morrison jerked up her chin— “and can look on calmly, do see the pity of it when beautiful emotions are lavished and wasted. So much force, so much time frittered away in dreams. And all so useless, so barren. Nothing I think is so sad as waste, and nothing is so wasteful as a one-sided love.”
Mrs. Morrison gave the pink tulle bow she liked to wear in the afternoons at her throat an agitated pat, and tried to conceal her misery that Augustus Shuttleworth should also have succumbed to Miss Neumann-Schultz. That he had done so was very clear from Lady Shuttleworth’s portentous remarks, for it was not in human nature for a woman to be thus solemn about the wasted emotions of other people’s sons. His doing so might save Robin’s future, but it would ruin Netta’s. We all have our little plans for the future — dear rosy things that we dote on and hug to our bosoms with more tenderness even than we hug the babies of our bodies, and the very rosiest and best developed of Mrs. Morrison’s darling plans was the marriage of her daughter Netta with the rich young man Augustus. It was receiving a rude knock on its hopeful little head at this moment in old Mrs. Jones’s front garden, and naturally the author of its being winced. Augustus, she feared, must be extremely far gone in love, and it was not likely that the girl would let such a chance go. It was a consolation that the marriage would be a scandal, — this person from nowhere, this niece of a German teacher, carrying off the wealthiest young man in the county. The ways of so-called Providence were quite criminally inscrutable, she thought, in stark defiance of what a vicar’s wife should think; but then she was greatly goaded.
Priscilla herself came out of Mrs. Jones’s door at that moment with a very happy face. She had succeeded in comforting the sick woman to an extent that surprised her. The sick woman had cheered up so suddenly and so much that Priscilla, delighted, had at once concluded that work among the sick poor was her true vocation. And how easy it had been! A few smiles, a few kind words, a five-pound note put gently into the withered old hands, and behold the thing was done. Never was sick woman so much comforted as Mrs. Jones. She who had been disinclined to speak above a whisper when Priscilla went in was able at the end of the visit to pour forth conversation in streams, and quite loud conversation, and even interspersed with chuckles. All Friday Priscilla had tried to help in the arranging of her cottage, and had made herself and Fritzing so tired over it that on Saturday she let him go up alone and decided that she would, for her part, now begin to do good to the people in the village. It was what she intended to do in future. It was to be the chief work of her new life. She was going to live like the poor and among them, smooth away their sorrows and increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary facts of life. And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the farm. It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead that sillinesses assailed her soul — shrinkings of the flesh from honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience at Annalise’s swollen eyes. Priscilla could have cried that night when she went to bed, if she had not held tears in scorn, at the sickliness of her spirit, her spirit that she had thought more than able to keep her body in subjection, that she had hoped was unalterably firm and brave. But see the uses of foolishness, — the reaction from it is so great that it sends us with a bound twice as far again along the right road as we were while we were wise and picking our way with clean shoes slowly among the puddles. Who does not know that fresh impulse, so strong and gracious, towards good that surges up in us after a period of sitting still in mud? What an experience it is, that vigorous shake and eager turning of our soiled face once more towards the blessed light. “I will arise and go to my Father” — of all the experiences of the spirit surely this is the most glorious; and behold the prudent, the virtuous, the steadfast — dogged workers in the vineyard in the heat of the day — are shut out from it for ever.
Priscilla had not backslided much; but short as her tarrying had been among the puddles she too sprang forward after it with renewed strength along the path she had chosen as the best, and having completed the second of her good works — the first had been performed just previously, and had been a warm invitation made personally from door to door to all the Symford mothers to send their children to tea and games at Baker’s Farm the next day, which was Sunday — she came away very happy from the comforted Mrs. Jones, and met the two arriving comforters in the front garden.
Now Priscilla’s and Mrs. Jones’s last words together had been these:
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Priscilla had asked, leaning over the old lady and patting her arm in farewell.
“No, deary — you’ve done enough already, God bless your pretty face,” said Mrs. Jones, squeezing the five-pound note ecstatically in her hands.
“But isn’t there anything you’d like? Can’t I get you anything? See, I can run about and you are here in bed. Tell me what I can do.”
Mrs. Jones blinked and worked her mouth and blinked again and wheezed and cleared her throat. “Well, I do know of something would comfort me,” she said at last, amid much embarrassed coughing.
“Tell me,” said Priscilla.
“I don’t like,” coughed Mrs. Jones.
“Tell me,” said Priscilla.
“I’ll whisper it, deary.”
Priscilla bent down her head, and the old lady put her twitching mouth to her ear.
“Why, of course,” said Priscilla smiling, “I’ll go and get you some at once.”
“Now God for ever bless your beautiful face, darlin’!” shrilled Mrs. Jones, quite beside herself with delight. “The Cock and ‘Ens, deary — that’s the place. And the quart bottles are the best; one gets more comfort out of them, and they’re the cheapest in the end.”
And Priscilla issuing forth on this errand met the arriving visitors in the garden.
“How do you do,” she said in a happy voice, smiling gaily at both of them. She had seen neither since she had dismissed them, but naturally she had never given that strange proceeding a thought.
“Oh — how do you do,” said Lady Shuttleworth, surprised to see her there, and with a slight and very unusual confusion of manner.
Mrs. Morrison said nothing but stood stiffly in the background, answering Priscilla’s smile with a stern, reluctant nod.
“I’ve been talking to poor old Mrs. Jones. Your son” — she looked at Mrs. Morrison— “told me how ill she was.”
“Did he?” said Mrs. Morrison, hardly raising her eyes a moment from the ground. This girl was her double enemy: bound, whatever she did, to make either a fool of her son or of her daughter.
“So I went in and tried to cheer her up. And I really believe I did.”
“Well that was very kind of you,” said Lady Shuttleworth, smiling in spite of herself, unable to withstand the charm of Priscilla’s personality. How supremely ridiculous of Mrs. Morrison to think that this girl was an adventuress. Such are the depths of ignorance one can descend to if one is buried long enough in the country.
“Now,” said Priscilla cheerfully, “she wants rum, and I’m just going to buy her some.”
“Rum?” cried Lady Shuttleworth in a voice of horror; and Mrs. Morrison started violently.
“Is it bad for her?” said Priscilla, surprised.
“Bad!” cried Lady Shuttleworth.
“It is,”
said Mrs. Morrison with her eyes on the ground, “poison for both body and soul.”
“Dear me,” said Priscilla, her face falling. “Why, she said it would comfort her.”
“It will poison both her body and her soul,” repeated Mrs. Morrison grimly.
“My dear,” said Lady Shuttleworth, “our efforts are all directed towards training our people to keep from drinking.”
“But she doesn’t want to drink,” said Priscilla. “She only wants to taste it now and then. I’m afraid she’s dying. Mustn’t she die happy?”
“It is our duty,” said Mrs. Morrison, “to see that our parishioners die sober.”
“But I’ve promised,” said Priscilla.
“Did she — did she ask for it herself?” asked Lady Shuttleworth, a great anxiety in her voice.
“Yes, and I promised.”
Both the women looked very grave. Mrs. Jones, who was extremely old and certainly dying — not from any special disease but from mere inability to go on living — had been up to this a shining example to Symford of the manner in which Christian old ladies ought to die. As such she was continually quoted by the vicar’s wife, and Lady Shuttleworth had felt an honest pride in this ordered and seemly death-bed. The vicar went every day and sat with her and said that he came away refreshed. Mrs. Morrison read her all those of her leaflets that described the enthusiasm with which other good persons behave in a like case. Lady Shuttleworth never drove through the village without taking her some pleasant gift — tea, or fruit, or eggs, or even little pots of jam, to be eaten discreetly and in spoonfuls. She also paid a woman to look in at short intervals during the day and shake up her pillow. Kindness and attention and even affection could not, it will be admitted, go further; all three had been heaped on Mrs. Jones with generous hands; and in return she had expressed no sentiments that were not appropriate, and never, never had breathed the faintest suggestion to any of her benefactors that what she really wanted most was rum. It shocked both the women inexpressibly, and positively pained Lady Shuttleworth. Mrs. Morrison privately believed Priscilla had put the idea into the old lady’s head, and began to regard her in something of the light of a fiend.
“Suppose,” said Priscilla, “we look upon it as medicine.”
“But my dear, it is not medicine,” said Lady Shuttleworth.
“It is poison,” repeated Mrs. Morrison.
“How can it be if it does her so much good? I must keep my promise. I wouldn’t disappoint her for the world. If only you’d seen her delight” — they quivered— “you’d agree that she mustn’t be disappointed, poor old dying thing. Why, it might kill her. But suppose we treat it as a medicine, and I lock up the bottle and go round and give her a little myself three or four times a day — wouldn’t that be a good plan? Surely it couldn’t hurt?”
“There is no law to stop you,” said Mrs. Morrison; and Lady Shuttleworth stared at the girl in silent dismay.
“I can try it at least,” said Priscilla; “and if I find it’s really doing her harm I’ll leave off. But I promised, and she’s expecting it now every minute. I can’t break my promise. Do tell me — is the Cock and Hens that inn round the corner? She told me it was best there.”
“But you cannot go yourself to the Cock and Hens and buy rum,” exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth, roused to energy; and her voice was full of so determined a protest that the vicar’s wife, who thought it didn’t matter at all where such a young woman went, received a fresh shock.
“Why not?” inquired Priscilla.
“My dear, sooner than you should do that I’ll — I’ll go and buy it myself,” cried Lady Shuttleworth.
“Gracious heavens,” thought Mrs. Morrison, perfectly staggered by this speech. Had Lady Shuttleworth suddenly lost her reason? Or was she already accepting the girl as her son’s wife? Priscilla looked at her a moment with grave eyes. “Is it because I’m a girl that I mustn’t?” she asked.
“Yes. For one thing. But—” Lady Shuttleworth shut her mouth.
“But what?” asked Priscilla.
“Oh, nothing.”
“If it’s not the custom of the country for a girl to go I’ll send Mr. Morrison,” said Priscilla.
“Send Mr. Morrison?” gasped the vicar’s wife.
“What, the vicar?” exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth.
“No, no,” said Priscilla smiling, “young Mr. Morrison. I see him over there tying up my creepers. He’s so kind. He’ll go. I’ll ask him.”
And nodding good-bye she hurried out of the garden and over to her cottage, almost running in her desire not to keep Mrs. Jones any longer in suspense.
The two women, rooted to the ground, watched her as if fascinated, saw her speak to Robin on his ladder, saw how he started and dropped his nails, saw how nimbly he clambered down, and how after the shortest parley the infatuated youth rushed away at once in the direction of the Cock and Hens. The only thing they did not see from where they stood was the twinkle in his eye.
“I don’t think,” murmured Lady Shuttleworth, “I don’t think, my dear, that I quite care to go in to Mrs. Jones to-day. I — I think I’ll go home.”
“So shall I,” said Mrs. Morrison, biting her lips to keep them steady. “I shall go and speak to the vicar.”
XI
What she meant by speaking to the vicar was a vigorous stirring of him up to wrath; but you cannot stir up vicars if they are truly good. The vicar was a pious and patient old man, practiced in forgiveness, in overlooking, in waiting, in trying again. Always slow to anger, as the years drew him more and more apart into the shadows of old age and he watched from their clear coolness with an ever larger comprehension the younger generations striving together in the heat, he grew at last unable to be angered at all. The scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down upon your wrath had no uses for him, for he possessed no wrath for the sun to go down upon. He had that lovable nature that sees the best in everything first, and then prefers to look no further. He took for granted that people were at bottom good and noble, and the assumption went a long way towards making them so. Robin, for instance, was probably saved by his father’s unclouded faith in him. Mrs. Morrison, a woman who had much trouble with herself, having come into the world with the wings of the angel in her well glued down and prevented from spreading by a multitude of little defects, had been helped without her knowing it by his example out of many a pit of peevishness and passion. Who shall measure the influence of one kind and blameless life? His wife, in her gustier moments, thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil, this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle. The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of one’s self to go on being calm in the face of it. With the blindness of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness of the object — the same remark exactly applies to husbands — she did not see that the vicar was the candle shining in a naughty world, that he was the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. And just as leaven leavens by its mere presence in the lump, by merely passively being there, and will go on doing it so long as there is a lump to leaven, so had the vicar, more than his hardworking wife, more than the untiring Lady Shuttleworth, more than any district visitor, parish nurse, or other holy person, influenced Symford by simply living in it in a way that would have surprised him had he known. There is a great virtue in sweeping out one’s own house and trimming its lamps before starting on the house and lamps of a neighbour; and since new dust settles every day, and lamps, I believe, need constant trimming, I know not when the truly tidy soul will have attained so perfect a spotlessness as to justify its issuing forth to attack the private dust of other people. And if it ever did, lo, it would find the necessity no longer there. Its bright untiringness would unconsciously have done its work, and every dimmer soul within sight of that cheerful shining been strengthened and inspired to go and do likewise.
But Mrs. Morrison, who saw things differently, was constantly trying to stir up storms in the
calm waters of the vicar’s mind; and after the episode in Mrs. Jones’s front garden she made a very determined effort to get him to rebuke Priscilla. Her own indignation was poured out passionately. The vicar was surprised at her heat, he who was so beautifully cool himself, and though he shook his head over Mrs. Jones’s rum he also smiled as he shook it. Nor was he more reasonable about Robin. On the contrary, he declared that he would think mightily little of a young man who did not immediately fall head over ears in love with such a pretty girl.
“You don’t mind our boy’s heart being broken, then?” questioned his wife bitterly; of her plans for Netta she had never cared to speak.
“My dear, if it is to be broken there is no young lady I would sooner entrust with the job.”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 71
