“I would advise all young ladies,” pursued Mrs. Yorke, “to study the characters of such children as they chance to meet with before they marry and have any of their own to consider well how they would like the responsibility of guiding the careless, the labour of persuading the stubborn, the constant burden and task of training the best.”
“But with love it need not be so very difficult,” interposed Caroline. “Mothers love their children most dearly — almost better than they love themselves.”
“Fine talk! very sentimental! There is the rough, practical part of life yet to come for you, young miss.”
“But, Mrs. Yorke, if I take a little baby into my arms — any poor woman’s infant, for instance — I feel that I love that helpless thing quite peculiarly, though I am not its mother. I could do almost anything for it willingly, if it were delivered over entirely to my care — if it were quite dependent on me.”
“You feel! Yes, yes! I dare say, now. You are led a great deal by your feelings, and you think yourself a very sensitive personage, no doubt. Are you aware that, with all these romantic ideas, you have managed to train your features into an habitually lackadaisical expression, better suited to a novel-heroine than to a woman who is to make her way in the real world by dint of common sense?”
“No; I am not at all aware of that, Mrs. Yorke.”
“Look in the glass just behind you. Compare the face you see there with that of any early-rising, hard-working milkmaid.”
“My face is a pale one, but it is not sentimental; and most milkmaids, however red and robust they may be, are more stupid and less practically fitted to make their way in the world than I am. I think more, and more correctly, than milkmaids in general do; consequently, where they would often, for want of reflection, act weakly, I, by dint of reflection, should act judiciously.”
“Oh no! you would be influenced by your feelings; you would be guided by impulse.”
“Of course I should often be influenced by my feelings. They were given me to that end. Whom my feelings teach me to love I must and shall love; and I hope, if ever I have a husband and children, my feelings will induce me to love them. I hope, in that case, all my impulses will be strong in compelling me to love.”
Caroline had a pleasure in saying this with emphasis; she had a pleasure in daring to say it in Mrs. Yorke’s presence. She did not care what unjust sarcasm might be hurled at her in reply. She flushed, not with anger but excitement, when the ungenial matron answered coolly, “Don’t waste your dramatic effects. That was well said — it was quite fine; but it is lost on two women — an old wife and an old maid. There should have been a disengaged gentleman present. — Is Mr. Robert nowhere hid behind the curtains, do you think, Miss Moore?”
Hortense, who during the chief part of the conversation had been in the kitchen superintending the preparations for tea, did not yet quite comprehend the drift of the discourse. She answered, with a puzzled air, that Robert was at Whinbury. Mrs. Yorke laughed her own peculiar short laugh.
“Straightforward Miss Moore!” said she patronizingly. “It is like you to understand my question so literally and answer it so simply. Your mind comprehends nothing of intrigue. Strange things might go on around you without your being the wiser; you are not of the class the world calls sharp-witted.”
These equivocal compliments did not seem to please Hortense. She drew herself up, puckered her black eyebrows, but still looked puzzled.
“I have ever been noted for sagacity and discernment from childhood,” she returned; for, indeed, on the possession of these qualities she peculiarly piqued herself.
“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.”<
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“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 look up for that kindling, something I have seen in past days, when my face, or my language, or my disposition had at some happy moment pleased him; I should discover only darkness. I had better go home.”
She took her bonnet from the table where it lay, and was just fastening the ribbon, when Hortense, directing her attention to a splendid bouquet of flowers in a glass on the same table, mentioned that Miss Keeldar had sent them that morning from Fieldhead; and went on to comment on the guests that lady was at present entertaining, on the bustling life she had lately been leading; adding divers conjectures that she did not very well like it, and much wonderment that a person who was so fond of her own way as the heiress did not find some means of sooner getting rid of this cortége of relatives.
“But they say she actually will not let Mr. Sympson and his family go,” she added. “They wanted much to return to the south last week, to be ready for the reception of the only son, who is expected home from a tour. She insists that her cousin Henry shall come and join his friends here in Yorkshire. I dare say she partly does it to oblige Robert and myself.”
“How to oblige Robert and you?” inquired Caroline.
“Why, my child, you are dull. Don’t you know — you must often have heard — — “
“Please, ma’am,” said Sarah, opening the door, “the prese
rves that you told me to boil in treacle — the congfiters, as you call them — is all burnt to the pan.”
“Les confitures! Elles sont brûlées? Ah, quelle négligence coupable! Coquine de cuisinière, fille insupportable!”
And mademoiselle, hastily taking from a drawer a large linen apron, and tying it over her black apron, rushed éperdue into the kitchen, whence, to speak truth, exhaled an odour of calcined sweets rather strong than savoury.
The mistress and maid had been in full feud the whole day, on the subject of preserving certain black cherries, hard as marbles, sour as sloes. Sarah held that sugar was the only orthodox condiment to be used in that process; mademoiselle maintained — and proved it by the practice and experience of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother — that treacle, “mélasse,” was infinitely preferable. She had committed an imprudence in leaving Sarah in charge of the preserving-pan, for her want of sympathy in the nature of its contents had induced a degree of carelessness in watching their confection, whereof the result was — dark and cindery ruin. Hubbub followed; high upbraiding, and sobs rather loud than deep or real.
Caroline, once more turning to the little mirror, was shading her ringlets from her cheek to smooth them under her cottage bonnet, certain that it would not only be useless but unpleasant to stay longer, when, on the sudden opening of the back-door, there fell an abrupt calm in the kitchen. The tongues were checked, pulled up as with bit and bridle. “Was it — was it — Robert?” He often — almost always — entered by the kitchen way on his return from market. No; it was only Joe Scott, who, having hemmed significantly thrice — every hem being meant as a lofty rebuke to the squabbling womankind — said, “Now, I thowt I heerd a crack?”
None answered.
“And,” he continued pragmatically, “as t’ maister’s comed, and as he’ll enter through this hoyle, I considered it desirable to step in and let ye know. A household o’ women is nivver fit to be comed on wi’out warning. Here he is. — Walk forrard, sir. They war playing up queerly, but I think I’ve quietened ‘em.”
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 98
