CHAPTER XXIII.
AN EVENING OUT.
One fine summer day that Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove — her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating their movements, her brain working restlessly — when Fanny came to the door, looked round over the lawn and borders, and not seeing her whom she sought, called out, “Miss Caroline!”
A low voice answered “Fanny!” It issued from the alcove, and thither Fanny hastened, a note in her hand, which she delivered to fingers that hardly seemed to have nerve to hold it. Miss Helstone did not ask whence it came, and she did not look at it; she let it drop amongst the folds of her work.
“Joe Scott’s son, Harry, brought it,” said Fanny.
The girl was no enchantress, and knew no magic spell; yet what she said took almost magical effect on her young mistress. She lifted her head with the quick motion of revived sensation; she shot, not a languid, but a lifelike, questioning glance at Fanny.
“Harry Scott! who sent him?”
“He came from the Hollow.”
The dropped note was snatched up eagerly, the seal was broken — it was read in two seconds. An affectionate billet from Hortense, informing her young cousin that she was returned from Wormwood Wells; that she was alone to-day, as Robert was gone to Whinbury market; that nothing would give her greater pleasure than to have Caroline’s company to tea, and the good lady added, she was quite sure such a change would be most acceptable and beneficial to Caroline, who must be sadly at a loss both for safe guidance and improving society since the misunderstanding between Robert and Mr. Helstone had occasioned a separation from her “meilleure amie, Hortense Gérard Moore.” In a postscript she was urged to put on her bonnet and run down directly.
Caroline did not need the injunction. Glad was she to lay by the brown holland child’s slip she was trimming with braid for the Jew’s basket, to hasten upstairs, cover her curls with her straw bonnet, and throw round her shoulders the black silk scarf, whose simple drapery suited as well her shape as its dark hue set off the purity of her dress and the fairness of her face; glad was she to escape for a few hours the solitude, the sadness, the nightmare of her life; glad to run down the green lane sloping to the Hollow, to scent the fragrance of hedge flowers sweeter than the perfume of moss-rose or lily. True, she knew Robert was not at the cottage; but it was delight to go where he had lately been. So long, so totally separated from him, merely to see his home, to enter the room where he had that morning sat, felt like a reunion. As such it revived her; and then Illusion was again following her in Peri mask. The soft agitation of wings caressed her cheek, and the air, breathing from the blue summer sky, bore a voice which whispered, “Robert may come home while you are in his house, and then, at least, you may look in his face — at least you may give him your hand; perhaps, for a minute, you may sit beside him.”
“Silence!” was her austere response; but she loved the comforter and the consolation.
Miss Moore probably caught from the window the gleam and flutter of Caroline’s white attire through the branchy garden shrubs, for she advanced from the cottage porch to meet her. Straight, unbending, phlegmatic as usual, she came on. No haste or ecstasy was ever permitted to disorder the dignity of her movements; but she smiled, well pleased to mark the delight of her pupil, to feel her kiss and the gentle, genial strain of her embrace. She led her tenderly in, half deceived and wholly flattered. Half deceived! had it not been so she would in all probability have put her to the wicket, and shut her out. Had she known clearly to whose account the chief share of this childlike joy was to be placed, Hortense would most likely have felt both shocked and incensed. Sisters do not like young ladies to fall in love with their brothers. It seems, if not presumptuous, silly, weak, a delusion, an absurd mistake. They do not love these gentlemen — whatever sisterly affection they may cherish towards them — and that others should, repels them with a sense of crude romance. The first movement, in short, excited by such discovery (as with many parents on finding their children to be in love) is one of mixed impatience and contempt. Reason — if they be rational people — corrects the false feeling in time; but if they be irrational, it is never corrected, and the daughter or sister-in-law is disliked to the end.
“You would expect to find me alone, from what I said in my note,” observed Miss Moore, as she conducted Caroline towards the parlour; “but it was written this morning: since dinner, company has come in.”
And opening the door she made visible an ample spread of crimson skirts overflowing the elbow-chair at the fireside, and above them, presiding with dignity, a cap more awful than a crown. That cap had never come to the cottage under a bonnet; no, it had been brought in a vast bag, or rather a middle-sized balloon of black silk, held wide with whalebone. The screed, or frill of the cap, stood a quarter of a yard broad round the face of the wearer. The ribbon, flourishing in puffs and bows about the head, was of the sort called love-ribbon. There was a good deal of it, I may say, a very great deal. Mrs. Yorke wore the cap — it became her; she wore the gown also — it suited her no less.
That great lady was come in a friendly way to take tea with Miss Moore. It was almost as great and as rare a favour as if the queen were to go uninvited to share pot-luck with one of her subjects. A higher mark of distinction she could not show — she who in general scorned visiting and tea-drinking, and held cheap and stigmatized as “gossips” every maid and matron of the vicinage.
There was no mistake, however; Miss Moore was a favourite with her. She had evinced the fact more than once — evinced it by stopping to speak to her in the churchyard on Sundays; by inviting her, almost hospitably, to come to Briarmains; evinced it to-day by the grand condescension of a personal visit. Her reasons for the preference, as assigned by herself, were that Miss Moore was a woman of steady deportment, without the least levity of conversation or carriage; also that, being a foreigner, she must feel the want of a friend to countenance her. She might have added that her plain aspect, homely, precise dress, and phlegmatic, unattractive manner were to her so many additional recommendations. It is certain, at least, that ladies remarkable for the opposite qualities of beauty, lively bearing, and elegant taste in attire were not often favoured with her approbation. Whatever gentlemen are apt to admire in women, Mrs. Yorke condemned; and what they overlook or despise, she patronized.
Caroline advanced to the mighty matron with some sense of diffidence. She knew little of Mrs. Yorke, and, as a parson’s niece, was doubtful what sort of a reception she might get. She got a very cool one, and was glad to hide her discomfiture by turning away to take off her bonnet. Nor, upon sitting down, was she displeased to be immediately accosted by a little personage in a blue frock and sash, who started up like some fairy from the side of the great dame’s chair, where she had been sitting on a footstool, screened from view by the folds of the wide red gown, and running to Miss Helstone, unceremoniously threw her arms round her neck and demanded a kiss.
“My mother is not civil to you,” said the petitioner, as she received and repaid a smiling salute, “and Rose there takes no notice of you; it is their way. If, instead of you, a white angel, with a crown of stars, had come into the room, mother would nod stiffly, and Rose never lift her head at all; but I will be your friend — I have always liked you.”
“Jessie, curb that tongue of yours, and repress your forwardness!” said Mrs. Yorke.
“But, mother, you are so frozen!” expostulated Jessie. “Miss Helstone has never done you any harm; why can’t you be kind to her? You sit so stiff, and look so cold, and speak so dry — what for? That’s just the fashion in which you treat Miss Shirley Keeldar and every o
ther young lady who comes to our house. And Rose there is such an aut — aut — I have forgotten the word, but it means a machine in the shape of a human being. However, between you, you will drive every soul away from Briarmains; Martin often says so.”
“I am an automaton? Good! Let me alone, then,” said Rose, speaking from a corner where she was sitting on the carpet at the foot of a bookcase, with a volume spread open on her knee. — “Miss Helstone, how do you do?” she added, directing a brief glance to the person addressed, and then again casting down her gray, remarkable eyes on the book and returning to the study of its pages.
Caroline stole a quiet gaze towards her, dwelling on her young, absorbed countenance, and observing a certain unconscious movement of the mouth as she read — a movement full of character. Caroline had tact, and she had fine instinct. She felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar child — one of the unique; she knew how to treat her. Approaching quietly, she knelt on the carpet at her side, and looked over her little shoulder at her book. It was a romance of Mrs. Radcliffe’s — “The Italian.”
Caroline read on with her, making no remark. Presently Rose showed her the attention of asking, ere she turned the leaf, “Are you ready?”
Caroline only nodded.
“Do you like it?” inquired Rose ere long.
“Long since, when I read it as a child, I was wonderfully taken with it.”
“Why?”
“It seemed to open with such promise — such foreboding of a most strange tale to be unfolded.”
“And in reading it you feel as if you were far away from England — really in Italy — under another sort of sky — that blue sky of the south which travellers describe.”
“You are sensible of that, Rose?”
“It makes me long to travel, Miss Helstone.”
“When you are a woman, perhaps, you may be able to gratify your wish.”
“I mean to make a way to do so, if one is not made for me. I cannot live always in Briarfield. The whole world is not very large compared with creation. I must see the outside of our own round planet, at least.”
“How much of its outside?”
“First this hemisphere where we live; then the other. I am resolved that my life shall be a life. Not a black trance like the toad’s, buried in marble; nor a long, slow death like yours in Briarfield rectory.”
“Like mine! what can you mean, child?”
“Might you not as well be tediously dying as for ever shut up in that glebe-house — a place that, when I pass it, always reminds me of a windowed grave? I never see any movement about the door. I never hear a sound from the wall. I believe smoke never issues from the chimneys. What do you do there?”
“I sew, I read, I learn lessons.”
“Are you happy?”
“Should I be happy wandering alone in strange countries as you wish to do?”
“Much happier, even if you did nothing but wander. Remember, however, that I shall have an object in view; but if you only went on and on, like some enchanted lady in a fairy tale, you might be happier than now. In a day’s wandering you would pass many a hill, wood, and watercourse, each perpetually altering in aspect as the sun shone out or was overcast; as the weather was wet or fair, dark or bright. Nothing changes in Briarfield rectory. The plaster of the parlour ceilings, the paper on the walls, the curtains, carpets, chairs, are still the same.”
“Is change necessary to happiness?”
“Yes.”
“Is it synonymous with it?”
“I don’t know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.”
Here Jessie spoke.
“Isn’t she mad?” she asked.
“But, Rose,” pursued Caroline, “I fear a wanderer’s life, for me at least, would end like that tale you are reading — in disappointment, vanity, and vexation of spirit.”
“Does ‘The Italian’ so end?”
“I thought so when I read it.”
“Better to try all things and find all empty than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin — despicable sluggard!”
“Rose,” observed Mrs. Yorke, “solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one’s duty.”
“Right, mother! And if my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is to trade with them, and make them ten talents more. Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be interred. I will not deposit it in a broken-spouted teapot, and shut it up in a china closet among tea-things. I will not commit it to your work-table to be smothered in piles of woollen hose. I will not prison it in the linen press to find shrouds among the sheets. And least of all, mother” (she got up from the floor) — “least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry, and ham on the shelves of the larder.”
She stopped, then went on, “Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The teapot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen will yield up their barren deposit in many a house. Suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master’s coming to pay Him His own with usury.”
“Rose, did you bring your sampler with you, as I told you?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Sit down, and do a line of marking.”
Rose sat down promptly, and wrought according to orders. After a busy pause of ten minutes, her mother asked, “Do you think yourself oppressed now — a victim?”
“No, mother.”
“Yet, as far as I understood your tirade, it was a protest against all womanly and domestic employment.”
“You misunderstood it, mother. I should be sorry not to learn to sew. You do right to teach me, and to make me work.”
“Even to the mending of your brothers’ stockings and the making of sheets?”
“Yes.”
“Where is the use of ranting and spouting about it, then?”
“Am I to do nothing but that? I will do that, and then I will do more. Now, mother, I have said my say. I am twelve years old at present, and not till I am sixteen will I speak again about talents. For four years I bind myself an industrious apprentice to all you can teach me.”
“You see what my daughters are, Miss Helstone,” observed Mrs. Yorke; “how precociously wise in their own conceits! ‘I would rather this, I prefer that’ — such is Jessie’s cuckoo song; while Rose utters the bolder cry, ‘I will, and I will not!’”
“I render a reason, mother; besides, if my cry is bold, it is only heard once in a twelvemonth. About each birthday the spirit moves me to deliver one oracle respecting my own instruction and management. I utter it and leave it; it is for you, mother, to listen or not.”
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 97
